I get letters. I get several a week, I think. A lot of people want a picture, a lot of people just want an autograph.

I spent most of my dough on booze, broads and boats and the rest I wasted.

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.

What do you tell a man with two black eyes? Nothing, he's already been told twice.

It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to sound like it does.

Using adverbs is a mortal sin.

At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.

Try not to write the parts that people skip.

All the information you need can be given in dialogue.

We are all the pieces of what we remember. We hold in ourselves the hopes and fears of those who love us. As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss.

I don't want to be remembered as a woman from Saint Louis who died. I want to be remembered as a woman from Saint Louis who left and actually did something with her life. Then died.

I have a motto: Work to become, not to acquire.

And if I know anything at all, it's that a wall is just a wall and nothing more at all. It can be broken down.

I can look you in the eye and tell you I feel I've tried to solve the problem diplomatically to the max, and would have committed troops both in Afghanistan and Iraq knowing what I know today.

Mine is not an autonomous imagination.

A child who is happy on his pony's back has something which will be to him a glorious memory that the years cannot dim.

The great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text.

Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan.

A sentence has meaning in the sense that a train has a track, not that a train has a passenger.