In a way, I am what they say I am. I am a hard-ass. I'm hard to get along with. Most of the time I'm moody. All that's true. I got no problem with people saying that.
The censure of a dog is something no man can stand.
There is only one rule for being a good talker - learn to listen.
I had a million questions to ask God: but when I met Him, they all fled my mind; and it didn't seem to matter.
We call a child's mind 'small' simply by habit; perhaps it is larger than ours is, for it can take in almost anything without effort.
Truth is what every man sees lurking at the bottom of his own soul, like the oyster shell housewives put in the kitchen kettle to collect the lime from the water. By and by each man's iridescent oyster shell of Truth becomes coated with the lime of prejudice and hearsay.
When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.
It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.
In this life many demolitions are actually renovations.
I'm a full-time believer in writing habits. . . You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows awayOf course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that's all the energy I have, but I don't let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, said Browning, and so it has - extended by the length of an artist's brush.