Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.
I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.
The divine art is the story.
All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.
I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dusk on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I begun in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales, and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.
