I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.

Maybe ever'body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.

It is possible, even probable, to be told a truth about a place, to accept it, to know it and at the same time not to know anything about it.

Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.

But a man needs company.

You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk.

I wish to God I knew as much about writing as I did when I was 19. I was absolutely certain about most things then. Also, I suspect, more accurate.