In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldnt turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.

She won't give him back his look.

Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.

You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.

It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore.