You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

In the days when I went to work, I never once knew what I was doing. These days, I never work. Work does age one so.

There was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing.

Ignore it: you never stop speaking; why stop writing?

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think of what to do with the long winter evenings.

T HE BEST ADVICE on writing I’ve ever received: Miss Stein said, “The way to say it is to say it.”

No one who intends to take up writing as a career should read any work that lies in the category in which his own efforts would be placed. If he disobeys this rule, he will almost certainly feel he must write literature instead of trying to say what he means.

Bow down before them. They know what they are doing.