There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again and once more, and over and over.

To be a writer is to sit down at one's desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone - just plain going at it, in pain and delight. To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over...

There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

The second stage set in ten or fifteen days after the bombing. The main symptom was falling hair. Diarrhoea and fever, which in some cases went as high as 106, came next.

Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; our life is short, we don't live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile.

When the writing is really working, I think there is something like dreaming going on. I don't know how to draw the line between the conscious management of what you're doing and this state. . . . I would say that it's related to daydreaming. When I feel really engaged with a passage, I become so lost in it that I'm unaware of my real surroundings, totally involved in the pictures and sounds that that passage evokes.