Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.

There's nothing like rejection to make you do an inventory of yourself.

I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I'm going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.

If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence inside our skin.

The system shaves the dice on the side of those with money and power, and anyone who believes otherwise deserves anything that happens to him.

You do it a day at a time. You write as well as you can, you put it in the mail, you leave it under submission, you never leave it at home.

And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was greater than any theft of my goods or money.

How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?

...and I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the great gifts of both Earth and Heaven.

When you find the right people, you never let go. The people who count are the ones who are your friends in lean times. You have all the friends you want when things are going well.

That's one of the great advantages of age. You can say, I don't want to, I don't care, you can throw temper tantrums, and nobody minds.

Being on the inside could be an addiction

You will never be satisfied with anything less than the highest you can attain.

This so-called contemporary art is not a form, but a philosophy of society.

Hitler is a dancing dervish. He must be shot down.

New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.

I have never been able to carry out any work coolly. On the contrary it is done, so to speak, with my own blood. Anyone who looks at my works must be able to sense that.

Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments.

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back

I was able to do something that people cant do these days, which is to have quality time with the guys who were trying to be president and a number of them who got the job.

Renunciation is in our blood.