I never show anything to anybody until I've finished it

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.

I was thinking of how sometimes, trying to say the right thing to people, it's like some kind of brain surgery...

Without music life would B flat

The best beauty in the world is the beauty of kindness.

It is not the Government, the members of Parliament to whom the ultimate decision belongs, it is up to you to go forward sure of your sacred right of free opinion, sure of your patriotism.

I confess my own leisure to be spent entirely in search of adventure, without regard to prudence, profit, self improvement, learning, or any other serious thing.

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.

Possibilities ...in the closet ...itching ...to break out ...but afraid of ...the fallout

It's such an extraordinary supple medium that you never do quite know what paint will do.

My daddy, he was somewhere between God and John Wayne.

Well, today people have to be self-reliant if they want a secure retirement income.