The desire to be self-supporting and financially independent is a divine desire
You are all right on time, except for the fact that time is the enemy of us all, and especially of the writer.
If you are not discouraged about your writing on a regular basis, you may not be trying hard enough. Any challenging pursuit will encounter frequent patches of frustration. Writing is nothing if not challenging.
Writing a novel is a very hard thing to do because it covers so long a space of time, and if you get discouraged it is not a bad sign, but a good one. If you think you are not doing it well, you are thinking the way real novelists do. I never knew one who did not feel greatly discouraged at times, and some get desperate, and I have always found that to be a good symptom.
Anybody can find out if he is a writer. If he were a writer, when he tried to write of some particular day, he would find in the effort that he could recall exactly how the light fell and how the temperature felt, and all the quality of it. Most people cannot do it. If they can do it, they may never be successful in a pecuniary sense, but that ability is at the bottom of writing, I am sure.
Editors are extremely fallible people, all of them. Don't put too much trust in them.
It is those people who know that they are right because some outside or higher power conveys the conviction to them who do the great damage in the world.
I would just like a woman someday, somewhere, at some point in my life to say to me, 'You're a great listener. ' Haven't heard it yet, and that's a superior compliment to get from a woman. But I'm going to work on it.
I am much afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labour in explaining the Holy Scriptures, and engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which means are not unceasingly occupied with the Word of God must be corrupt.
People who work on soaps all the time understand the formula of how to do it.
Pleasures are all alike simply considered in themselves: he that hunts, or he that governs the commonwealth, they both please themselves alike, only we commend that, whereby we ourselves receive some benefit.