A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.

If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time

This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.

They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.

All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't.

You men,' she says. 'You durn men.

With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow.