Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.
I used to build dreams about you.
Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.
Only remember west of the Mississippi it’s a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way.
There are no second acts in American lives.
Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one.
A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.
Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.
I wish I could write. I get these ideas but I never seem to be able to put them in words.
To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.