For that reason you can't write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you're writing, and for that you need silence

I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we've got, which is "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." I told those stories many, many times.

If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway.

Everyone, from the Mother Superior to the priests to my parents--they were so upset and reproachful...I felt as if something they all passionately believed in depended on me carrying on with something I didn't.

Looking at them now, thought Jim, you'd never believe they weren't in love with each other, and not with a hopeless, doomed obsession like poor Isabel Meredith. This was what love ought to be like: playful and passionate and teasing, and dangerous, too, with sharp intelligence in it.

You are dead- what am I speaking to?

I got a book token for Christmas and exchanged it for a book called A History of Art, and that book (which I still have-battered and falling to pieces) became more precious to me than any Bible.