Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.

The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves

But what's the good of freedom? What can you do with it? What one wants is to live well and have a beautiful house and be respected by people.

A set of ideas, a point of view, a frame of reference is in space only an intersection, the state of affairs at some given momentin the consciousness of one man or many men, but in time it has evolving form, virtually organic extension. In time ideas can be thought of as sprouting, growing, maturing, bringing forth seed and dying like plants.

Women alone always order sole. It means something.

It's rather grisly, isnt it, how soon a living man becomes nothing more than a collection of stocks and bonds and debts and real estate?

I do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times. Occasionally you can hit it right the first time. More often, you don't.