You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

What's wrong with this world is, it's not finished yet. It is not completed to that point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, "It is finished. We made it, and it works.

Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash.

It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret.

Gettysburg. . . . You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.

I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique.