Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.

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

The most important thing is insight, that is to be - curious - to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

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

Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.

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.