Kay Boyle

“Spring is a time to find out where you are, who you are, and move toward where you are going.”

“Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of writer stocks up enough aberration to last him through the winter.”

“Art is not a pleasure trip. It is a battle, a mill that grinds.”

“Perhaps the only way to write what is true is to write what is not true.”

“I have for a long time, worked round the clock... practicing my art, whatever you may call it.”

“Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the life of the writer, and there is the life of the work.”

“The materials of art are social, not personal.”

“I have never subscribed to the cynical belief that writers are competitive. I think that they are quite the opposite, that they are very comradeshiply.”

“I don't think you can write--really write--without being a part of the world.”

“What is a writer? A writer is a person who cares. A writer is a person who has a sense of the tragic.”

“Loyalty is a fine quality, but in a writer it can be misunderstood. It can be misinterpreted as compromise, as accommodation.”

“A writer must have a place where he or she can be alone.”

“I should like to write a book about what goes on in a woman's mind.”

“In the country, a good wife is good for five hundred dollars; in the city she is good for five thousand dollars; but a bad wife is bad for heaven knows how much.”