If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.

No person ever died that had a family.

When I finished [writing it], I was crying. I knew at long last, after ten years of trying, I had written something good.

Just write every day of your life. Read intensely.

Day, after day, after glorious day, I was falling in love with books.

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.