I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.

If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

But with the library, it's like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there's so much to look at and read.

I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.

I am a dedicated madman, and that becomes its own training. If you can't resist, if the typewriter is like candy to you, you train yourself for a lifetime. Every single day of your life, some wild new thing to be done. You write to please yourself. You write for the joy of writing. Then your public reads you and it begins to gather around your selling a potato peeler in an alley, you know. The enthusiasm, the joy itself draws me. So that means every day of my life I've written. When the joy stops, I'll stop writing.

A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping, your readers passengers on a boat, whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and changing scemery.