'I never feel the need to discuss my work with anyone. No, I am too busy writing it. It has got to please me and if it does I don't need to talk about it. If it doesn't please me, talking about it won't improve it, since the only thing to improve it is to work on it some more. I am not a literary man but only a writer. I don't get any pleasure from talking shop.

I listen to the voices.

...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

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

I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.