“The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.”

“You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”

“Something not going well, Mr. Boxley?"The novelist looked back at him in thunderous silence."I read your letter," said Stahr. The tone of the pleasant young headmaster was gone. He spoke as to an equal, but with a faint two-edged deference."I can't get what I write on paper," broke out Boxley. "You've all been very decent, but it's a sort of conspiracy. Those two hacks you've teamed me with listen to what I say, but they spoil it--they seem to have a vocabulary of about a hundred words.""Why don't you write it yourself?" asked Stahr."I have. I sent you some.""But it was just talk, back and forth," said Stahr mildly. "Interesting talk but nothing more." Now it was all the two ghostly attendants could do to hold Boxley in the deep chair. He struggled to get up; he uttered a single quiet bark which had some relation to laughter but non to amusement, and said:"I don't think you people read things. The men are duelling when the conversation takes place. At the end one of them falls into a well and has to be hauled up in a bucket."He barked again and subsided.Would you write that in a book of your own, Mr. Boxley?""What? Naturally not.""You'd consider it too cheap.""Movie standards are different," said Boxley, hedging."Do you ever go to them?""No--almost never.""Isn't it because people are always duelling and falling down wells?"Yes--and wearing strained facial expressions and talking incredible and unnatural dialogue.""Skip the dialogue for a minute," said Stahr. "Granted your dialogue is more graceful than what these hacks can write--that's why we brought you out here. But let's imagine something that isn't either bad dialogue or jumping down a well.”

“What are you going to do? "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.”

“I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I’m his ideal.”

“As for Tom, the fact that he "had some woman in New York" was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.”

“He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was ....”