You're...writing for other writers to an extent-the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read.

In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.

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.

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.

I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.

Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn't hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.