No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
Nothing any good isn’t hard.
Life was a damned muddle – a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of – everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side.
The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.
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.