The writer's only responsibility is to his art.

He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.

It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.

There is no such thing as was - only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.

I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.

I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.

Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash.