A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.

Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.

When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.

Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy.

The last paragraph in which you tell what the story is about is almost always best left out.

I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.

Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.

Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life

People who light up like Roman candles come down in the dark very quickly.

If football players were armed with guns, there wouldn't be stadiums large enough to hold the crowds.

The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.

When I was young, I thought I was a very smart and learned person.But now, the more I read, the more I learn, the more I think, the humbler I become.

I wish I was as sure of anything as Macaulay is of everything.

Spring being a tough act to follow, God created June.

[T]here is not a syllable in the plan under consideration which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution.

Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?

It's a mistake to ask a work of art to be all things to all people.

Playing in front of millions of people erases everything I hate about myself. Nothing can hurt me.

In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.

Ask 'What' and 'When.' The 'How' will naturally be revealed.

I should only ever tell the king what he ought to do, not what he could do. For if the lion knows his own strength, no man could control him.