A Bottle Of Wine Was Good Company.

The Fact That I Am Interrupting Serious Work To Answer These Questions Proves That I Am So Stupid That I Should Be Penalized Severely. I Will Be. Don't Worry.

The Further You Go In Writing The More Alone You Are. Most Of Your Best And Oldest Friends Die. Others Move Away. You Do Not See Them Except Rarely, But You Write And Have Much The Same Contact With Them As Though You Were Together At The Café In The Old Days. You Exchange Comic, Sometimes Cheerfully Obscene And Irresponsible Letters, And It Is Almost As Good As Talking. But You Are More Alone Because That Is How You Must Work And The Time To Work Is Shorter All The Time And If You Waste It You Feel You Have Committed A Sin For Which There Is No Forgiveness.

There Is Nothing To Writing. All You Do Is Sit Down At A Typewriter And Bleed.

I Know War As Few Other Men Now Living Know It, And Nothing To Me Is More Revolting. I Have Long Advocated Its Complete Abolition, As Its Very Destructiveness On Both Friend And Foe Has Rendered It Useless As A Method Of Settling International Disputes.

The Hardest Thing To Do Is To Write Straight Honest Prose On Human Beings. First You Have To Know The Subject; Then You Have To Know How To Write. Both Take A Lifetime To Learn, And Anybody Is Cheating Who Takes Politics As A Way Out. All The Outs Are Too Easy, And The Thing Itself Is Too Hard To Do.