All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand - a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods - or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.

A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.

Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.

People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.

Ugly accidents happen . . . always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile and forgotten. They don`t leave any lasting scar in the world, and they don`t affect the future. The things that last are the good things. The people who forge ahead and do something, they really count.