You live long enough in a world spinning on its axis, you learn to spin in the same direction.
There is no such thing as great writing - there is only great re-writing!
Never delay kissing a pretty girl or opening a bottle of whiskey
No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
All cowardice comes from not truly loving, or at least, not loving well.
You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.
The world breaks everyone or nearly everyone, of their childish illusions, assumptions and wishes, often painfully and afterwards due to the personal growth in practical experience, insight and the resulting wisdom many are strong at the broken places just like mended broken bones often are, and some people even have the great insight to be grateful for the purifying fire.
After 911, there were a lot of things being said about how the God of Islam and the God of the Christian faith were one and the same, but that's simply not true. . . The God that I worship does not require me to kill other people. The God that I worship tells me I am to love my enemy, to give him food when he's hungry and water when he's thirsty.
We have to wear clothes, a requirement of custom, but more time, temper, character, and peace of mind, not to mention money, have been sacrificed to them than to any other altar on this green earth, and for what?
Of course at that point I had no idea that the adventure was only beginning and that the struggle and the rejections were to pile before me, a typical young writer, in an implacable mountain. But I was on my way.
I might be in the basement. I'll go upstairs and check.