“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”

“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”

“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”

“I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.”

“Write hard and clear about what hurts. ”

“When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”

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

“All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”

“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, [censored] detector.”

“After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.”

“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.”

“When you start to live outside yourself, it's all dangerous.”