Most people won't realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

First impressions are often signals from the deep that we should credit oftener than we do.

Mexican writer and diplomat, "Pasado en claro" ("A Draft of Shadows") You learn something the day you die. You learn how to die.

Writing, in any sense that matters, cannot be taught. It can only be learned by each separate one of us in his own way, by the use of his own powers of imagination and perception, the ability to learn the lessons he has set for himself.

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

Each generation must get on the same old merry-go-round, only disguised in a fresh coat of paint.

Most people won't realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.