You see it's awfully hard to talk or write about your own stuff because if it is any good you yourself know about how good it is - but if you say so yourself you feel like a shit.

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.

Do you remember how old Ford was always writing how Conrad suffered so when he wrote? How it was un metier de chien etc. Do you suffer when you write? I don't …

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