I know that the writer does call up the general and maybe the essential through the particular, but this general and essential is still deeply embedded in mystery. It is not answerable to any of our formulas.

There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one.

Unadaptability is often a virtue.

The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.

In the first place you can be so absolutely honest and so absolutely wrong at the same time that I think it is better to be a combination of cautious and polite

I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see.