But when it does go well, when the illumination has focused a work so that it goes limpidly and flows, there is no gladness like it. Truly it is financially the most ill-rewarded occupation in the world. The Member of the Wedding, and it is, over the five years I worked on it, twenty-eight cents a day. Then the irony is, the play The Member of the Wedding had made so much money that I've had to give eighty per cent to the government which I'm happy, or at least have to be happy, to do. It must be that one writes from some subconscious need for communication, for self-expression.
Writing is a wandering, dreaming occupation.
The intellect is submerged beneath the unconscious the thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination. Yet writing is not utterly amorphous and unintellectual. Some of the best novels and prose are as exact as a telephone number, but few prose writers can achieve this because of the refinement of passion and poetry that is necessary. Here truly there was isolation, but physical rather than spiritual isolation. Several years ago, Anne Frank's father made an appointment to see me at the Hotel Continental in Paris.