If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then read more

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

All autobiography is self-indulgent.

All autobiography is self-indulgent.

I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if read more

I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.

We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.

We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.

I wanted to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be read more

I wanted to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and read more

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

The fact that writers will go through so much to remain writers says something, perhaps everything. It would be far read more

The fact that writers will go through so much to remain writers says something, perhaps everything. It would be far easier (and nearly always more profitable) to become a real estate agent.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.