The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

The life you save may very well be your own.

It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them - in which case, if you don't watch out, they cease to be adversaries.

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it

The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.

She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.

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.