What I intended to do was to burn a half dozen of my books and keep warm, so that I could write my story, but when I looked around for titles to burn, I couldn't find any.

If you can't write a decent short story because of the cold, write something else. Write anything. Write a long letter to somebody.

There is much for a young writer to learn from our poorest writers. It is very destructive to burn bad books, almost more destructive than to burn good ones.

Then swiftly, neatly, with the grace of the young man on the trapeze, he was gone from his body. For an eternal moment he was still all things at once: the bir…

He had no wish to obliterate anything he had written, but he would dearly have liked to revise it, envying painters, who are allowed to return to the same them…

There is a pleasure in poetic pains Which only poets know.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.