Decide what the rest of your life is to be. Whatever you are now, you might be forever.

Decide what the rest of your life is to be. Whatever you are now, you might be forever.

All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner.

I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way.

Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story — or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall — is, Is it dead or alive?

I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by the time I was thirty, and so I gave up my job and moved to Paris at twenty-eight. I just held my breath and jumped. I didn’t even look to see if there was water in the pool.

A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.