I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written

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.

We don't need a destination or a way of navigating, because we'll go wherever it takes us

I wanted it for how it made me feel, regardless of how little it cared for me. Do whatever you want -- just give me the bliss.

Everything is good when it is on time.

One of the greatest gifts I've ever gotten is my daughter.

Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.

Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking.

Why slap them on the wrist with feather when you can belt them over the head with a sledgehammer.

I wouldn't say that my experience making it [the Waitress] was necessarily uplifting, but watching it with an audience, I was surprised at how hopeful it was at the end.

All war aims for impunity.

You can learn a lot about yourself with what youre doing and who youre with on a sunday.