“As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”

“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”

“How good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.”

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”

“You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.”

“The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.”

“Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.”