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.

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.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

My, my. A body does get around.

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.

...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

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