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I'm still a small shrimp, not a dragon.

'Some day,' I said, 'I will be an author.'

If you can be anything else but a writer, be it.

A writer is what I am.

As a writer, you aren't anybody until you become somebody.

Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.

I'm horrified of lobsters. And shrimp and lobsters are the cockroaches of the ocean.

I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought... I thought... maybe, one day, I could be one of them.