Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

For Christ sake write and don’t worry what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the waste-basket.… Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously .

Goodnight, my kitten.

Grace under pressure.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

He had married on the rebound from the rotten time he had in college, and Frances took him on the rebound from his discovery that he had not been everything to his first wife.

He was fairly happy, except that, like many people living in Europe, he would rather have been in America, and he had discovered writing.

He wrote a novel, and it was not really such a bad novel as the critics later called it, although it was a very poor novel.