“I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.”

Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.

Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else.

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.

When you forget to eat, you know you’re alive.

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.

It’s never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.

Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.

I call people rich when they’re able to meet the requirements of their imagination.

I think patriotism is like charity — it begins at home.

I’ve always expected the worst, and it’s always worse than I expected.

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.

Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.

If you have work to do, don’t wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.

Artistic vision is having the clarity to fall in love with what you see.

To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.

We recommend for the training of teachers not only a considerable artistic education in general but special attention to the art of reading.

Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

There can be no ‘graduated exercises in drawing’ leading up to an artistic creation. That goal can be attained only through the development of mechanical technique and through the freedom of the spirit.

Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort.

That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.