She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.

He [the writer] must, teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and compassion and sacrifice. See Poets & Writers

Really the writer doesn't want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

History is not was, it is.

The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique.