Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

More from Paris Review interview (1958)

• I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
• A gentleman can live through anything.
• A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune.
• Between grief and nothing I will take grief.
• Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
• Even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as an honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.