For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.

The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.

The weather of Depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.

It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self -- to the mediating intellect-- as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.

And when you get an eminent journal like Time magazine complaining, as it often has, that to the young writers of today life seems short on rewards and that what they write is a product of their own neuroses, in its silly way the magazine is merely stating the status quo and obvious truth. The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.