The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.

This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.

He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.

When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...

Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.

It always takes a man that never made much at any thing to tell you how to run your business, though. Like these college professors without a whole pair of socks to his name, telling you how to make a million in ten years, and a woman that couldn't even get a husband can always tell you how to raise a family.

So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice.