The hard part is putting one word after another.

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.

Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")