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

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.

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.

There are too many books I haven’t read, too many places I haven’t seen, too many memories I haven’t kept long enough.

That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn't matter, in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future.

She didn't want to talk with Levi. And wasn't that the problem. She wanted to do things that didn't involve any talking. Well, maybe it did if you counted dirty talk.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sometimes to love is easy, but to accept love is hard.

Destiny is what every human being creates for oneself. Fate is when you fail to create your own destiny.

Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.

And every shepherd tells his tale Under the hawthorn in the dale.

God made so many different kinds of people; why would God allow only one way to worship?

I haven't, in the 23 years that I have been in the uniformed services of the United States of America, ever violated an order - not one.

Actually I'm a big fan of Spielberg and the way he shoots action scenes.