If you're going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he'd better be real enough that you can smell his breath.

Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden.

And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me.

The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading a book.

Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.

What the artist wishes to do — as far as you are concerned — is to take you out of yourself. As far as he is concerned, he wishes to express himself.

Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.

Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.

Pride and reserve are not the only things in life; perhaps they are not even the best things. But if they happen to be your particular virtues you will go all to pieces if you let them go.

The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story - and then your story!

New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible - because it is large enough to be incurious.

My two greatest loves were, of course, Daphne and Hyacinthus, but when you're a god as popular as

It's not a pretty face, I grant you. But underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.

Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?

There's a lust to get on TV.

Walk boldly through your life with an open, broken heart.

There are no conflicts which cannot be resolved unless the true promoters of them remain hidden.

Shoot you on the front porch and knock you to the back yard.