Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.

The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.

No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.

Christianity is a strangely cheery religion.

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

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