In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue.

Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.

American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.

To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.