I Look Upon Literature As An Art,

Every Young Artist Has To Do It One Way, His [or Her] Way, And The Hell With Patterns. Remember Who You Are And Where You Are And What You Are Doing.... And Never Take Advice, Including This.

Human Life Itself May Be Almost Pure Chaos, But The Work Of The Artist Is To Take These Handfuls Of Confusion And Disparate Things, Things That Seem To Be Irreconcilable, And Put Them Together In A Frame To Give Them Some Kind Of Shape And Meaning.

Those Who Give The Orders Are Not The Ones To Die The People Who Are Doing The Work And The Fighting And The Dying, And Those Who Are Doing The Talking, Are Not All The Same People.

The Arts Do Live Continuously, And They Live Literally By Faith; Their Names And Their Shapes And Their Uses And Their Basic Meanings Survive Unchanged In All That Matters Through Times Of Interruption, Diminishment, Neglect; They Outlive Governments And Creeds And The Societies, Even The Very Civilization That Produced Them. They Cannot Be Destroyed Altogether Because They Represent The Substance Of Faith And The Only Reality. They Are What We Find Again When The Ruins Are Cleared Away.

I Will Never Again Attempt To Tell Any Young Person What To Do - The Really Gifted Don't Need Advice And The Others Can't Take It.