You say what you have to say. But you have to learn to say it in such a way that the reader can see what you mean.

I could go on to speak of sanity as compared with insanity, decency as compared with vandalism, friendship as compared with rabies.

Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write, I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing. In the water I am beautiful.