A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing -- articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.

Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please.

... one doesn't really profit from experience; one merely learns to predict the next mistake.

I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.

Did you ever notice how easy it is to forgive a person any number of faults for one endearing characteristic, for a certain style, or some commitment to life - while someone with many good qualities is insupportable for a single defect if it happens to be a boring one?

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.