I think you should learn about writing from everybody who has ever written that has anything to teach you….Like me to write you a little essay on The Importance of Subject? Well the reason you are so sore you missed the war is because war is the best subject of all. It groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get….Love is also a good subject as you might be said to have discovered. Other major subjects are the money from which we get riches and poores. Also avarice…A dull subject I should say would be impotence. Murder is a good one so get a swell murder into yr. next book and sit back.

If you serve time for society, democracy, and the other things quite young, and declining any further enlistment make yourself responsible only to yourself, you exchange the pleasant, comforting stench of comrades for something you can never feel in any other way than by yourself. That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely.