Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.
Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.
A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.
In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance; from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.
It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.
Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.
To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.
The prayers of all good people are good.
So long as a novelist works selfishly for the pleasure of creating character and situation corresponding to his own illusions, ideals and intuitions, he will always produce something worth while and natural. Directly he takes himself too seriously and begins for the alleged benefit of humanity an elaborate dissection of complexes, he evolves a book that is more ridiculous and tiresome than the most conventional cold cream girl novel of yesterday.
I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.
Art, it seems to me, should simplify.
Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones.
The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.
This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.
One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.
Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.
Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
Happy people do a great deal for their friends.
We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids.
Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
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