“It is my considered opinion that one reason you are not writing is that you are allowing yourself to read in the time set aside to write. You ought to set aside three hours every morning in which you write or do nothing else; no reading, no talking, no cooking, no nothing, but you sit there. If you write all right and if you don’t all right, but you do not read; whether you start something different every day and finish nothing makes no difference; you sit there. It’s the only way, I’m telling you. If inspiration comes you are there to receive it, you are not reading. And don’t write letters during that time. If you don’t write, don’t do anything else. And get in a room by yourself. If there are two rooms in that house, get in the one where nobody else is…”

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“My peachicken has turned out to be a cock which means that in three years if he survives dogs, foxes, weasels, mink, and internal worms, he will have a tail-spread of four feet. He has one trick: he runs up to anyone holding a cigaret and snatches it away and eats it. He has eaten two hot cigarets so far.”

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“I have always been a very innocent speller. I never sense that I am spelling something incorrectly and so don’t look up the words. The simpler the word, the more liable I am to come up with a rare spelling.”

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“Thanks so much for your letter. I am very glad to hear you have a novel that will be out in November. I hope you won’t have as much trouble about keeping people from having parties for you as I am having. Around here if you publish the number of whiskers on the local pigs, everybody has to give you a tea. If you don’t send me a copy of your book, I will go to the extreme of buying one.”

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“I was going to bring you some peacock feathers to go against your yellow walls. I think they are too long to mail. Next year I will have 7 cocks shedding tails instead of one and I should be able to go into some kind of business. My mother claims the feathers we have sitting around create moths. I claim they do not. Impasse.”

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“Today I got a letter from a man who said he had spent his childhood among characters such as I had portrayed. Poor man. He said since he had seen them in print they burdened his conscience less.”

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“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story.”

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