It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.

I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn't being pious. Just practical. Cancer may cool you, but the other's sure to.

There's lots of things you don't know. All kinds of strange things . . . mostly they happened before we were born: that makes them seem to me so much more real.

It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural.

It was the most haunting room I've ever seen. Because you know what's in it? All the left­overs, all the paraphernalia that the different condemned men had had with them in the "holding" cells.

Let's take everything just as it is.

Good writing is rewriting.