After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything.

I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought.

The artist works by locating the world in himself

One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.