At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

If every soldier refused to take arms ... there would be no wars; but no one has the courage to be the first to live according to Christ and Socrates, because in a world of opportunists they would be martyred.

I feel terribly vulnerable and 'not-myself' when I'm not writing.

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.