Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.

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.

Habit is not mere subjugation it is a tender tie when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

After living out of a suitcase for years, it's a feeling of peace to wake up in the night and know where I am.

The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.

And now, dear sister, I must leave this house or the retreating army will make me a prisoner in it by filling up the road I am directed to take.

The joy that compassion brings is one of the best-kept secrets of humanity. It is a secret known only to a very few people, a secret that has to be rediscovered over and over again.

I always see those of whom I have heard well with a slight disappointment. They are so much better than the great herd, and yet the heavens are not shivered into diamonds over their heads.

Stand for something or you will fall for anything. Today's mighty oak is yesterday's nut that held its ground.

I love team sports - they give me something to focus on rather than the fact that I can't breathe or my muscles are aching.

When you look like I do its hard to get a table for one at Chucky Cheese.