I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.

God, I wish you could have been there.

Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day.

I feel overwhelmingly grateful to them, but I don't know what to do with their invisible gifts.

It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true.

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody.

There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. I pay for this kind of attitude. I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work.