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.

I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.

It is the abiding concern of thinking people to preserve what keeps men human-to save our contact with nature of which we are a part.

Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.