I was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.

I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.

Happiness is fugitive; dissatisfaction and boredom are real.

Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn't a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.

A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone's written the story. He's supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.

Beauty is a luster which love bestows to guile the eye. Therefore it may be said that only when the brain is without love will the eye look and see no beauty.

You used the word "civilization", which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things.