Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.

The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.

Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.

The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.