“First learn to write as if you were already dead and then you will learn to write as if you were still alive.”

“If you find that thing you love, it doesn't necessarily matter whether you do it well or not-you just need to do it.”

“Thus it is well to seem merciful faithful humane religious and upright and also to be so but the mind should remain so balanced that were it needful not to be so you should be able and know how to change to the contrary.”

“You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.”

“It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

“How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation.”

“The gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.”