Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat...nor make love for eight hours...

The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trouble with it.

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.

A dream is not a very safe thing to be near... I know; I had one once. It's like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it's a good dream, it's worth it.