By encouraging the critic in themselves (the hater) they have killed the artist (the lover).

Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.

Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.

...writing is not a performance but a generosity.

Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.

...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.

Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people.

...the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e., share it with others?

At least I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it.

Everyone knows how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter, --making us think of funnier and funnier things.

We ought to love one another.

It's the not-yet in the now, the taste of the fruit that does not-yet exist, hanging the blossom on the bough.

We look for pretty girls we can say bad things to. No one shows up.

Powerful people cannot afford to educate the people that they oppress, because once you are truly educated, you will not ask for power. You will take it.

Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.

After watching films of Jim Brown, I noticed that he never ran out of bounds. He always ran North and South and that's what I turned my style into. I was a North and South runner.

Doctor says to a man, "You're pregnant!" The man says, "How does a man get pregnant?" The doctor says, "The usual way - a little wine, a little dinner...."

There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

You can't eat beauty, it doesn't sustain you. What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion, for yourself and those around you. That kind of beauty inflamed the heart and merchants the soul.

Atheists maintain that spiritual experience is purely subjective, with no basis in a reality outside of the subject.