"Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible." — Lillian Hellman

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.