For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

More from Catherine Drinker Bowen

• Chamber music — a conversation between friends.
• Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness.
• In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fiction parts should be printed in red ink, the fact parts in black ink.
• I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more, as I grown older.
• Will the reader turn the page?
• Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them.