But who can speak to God, or rather who can’t? The question is, who can get an answer?
You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.
The mad also laugh, or is that what Freud and the others discovered perhaps, that only the mad laugh?
I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.
There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall some day die and be forgotten. Knowing all this a writer is gentle and kindly where another man is severe and unkind.
Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.
Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world.
There could be no extreme vanity in my recognition of myself, if in fact there could be any at all.
The simple fact was that if the song wasn’t about me, I couldn’t see how it could possibly be about anybody else, including the one I knew it was supposed to be about, and good luck to him, too.
Writers are a fascinating breed, because there are so many kinds of them, they are made by so many circumstances, conditions, and mysteries, and there are so many ways for writing to be done.
Even after you’ve won fame and fortune, every time you write you’ve got to write, there’s no shortcut, you have to start your career all over again.
The best that can be said for anybody is probably that you misunderstood him favorably.
I have never received a telephone call that justified the excitement and fuss of the electronics involved. If I can’t see somebody I love, for instance, such as a daughter, or a son, I would rather receive a letter.
You live and die according to what goes on in yourself, which no one else can even begin to know, not even father, mother, wife, son, or daughter.
Human memory works its own wheel, and stops where it will, entirely without reference to the last stop, and with no connection with the next.
Sometimes the most intelligent thing is not to do anything, certainly nothing loaded with the imbecility of emotionality.
San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure.
The people you like when you meet them and while you know them, and the people you remember fondly, are invariably people who have a sense of comedy, not just a sense of humor.
This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.
You must remember always to give, of everything you have. You must give foolishly even. You must be extravagant. You must give to all who come into your life. Then nothing and no one shall have power to cheat you of anything, for if you give to a thief, he cannot steal from you, and he himself is then no longer a thief. And the more you give, the more you will have to give.