A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.

Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.

Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.