Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.

... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.

I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing. . . If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.

It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.

Sickness is a place, ... and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.

As for the blood and the head business, the blood and the head work together and what is not first in the blood can sometimes reach it by going first through the head and what is wrong in the blood can sometimes be tempered by the head.

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.