It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.

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

There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.

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.

There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.