“I knew the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer.”

On Beyond Zebra! (1955)

Source: Factotum (1975), Ch. 73
Context: There were always men looking for jobs in America. There were always all these usable bodies. And I wanted to be a writer. Almost everybody was a writer. Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer. Of those fifty guys in the room, probably fifteen of them thought they were writers. Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i. e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren't writers, or even cab drivers, and some men - many men - unfortunately aren't anything.

Preface
Welcome to the Monkey House (1968)

"A Day of Pleasure" (1996)

Discussing two separate pre-season shoulder injuries, sustained, respectively, in February 1968 to the right shoulder, and in March 1969 to the left; as quoted in &quot;A Sounder Clemente Has New Outlook; Buc Super Star May Play On and On&quot; https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=JFAOAAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=4H0DAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=7168,1534716 by Charley Feeney, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Tuesday, August 12, 1969), p. 18 <br class="br">Baseball-related, &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;1960s&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;, &lt;big&gt;1969&lt;/big&gt;

Source: Ham on Rye

Source: A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck

Source: &quot;Turning Loss into Beauty: The Tragedies of Geling Yan&quot; in The Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB930264290705115630 (25 June 1999)