All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad, or peculiar.
You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.
I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.
I finally understood that I didn’t lack pen and paper but my own memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking, a great human gift disowned.
Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.