In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75

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.

Wealth, howsoever got, in England makes lords of mechanics, gentlemen of rakes; Antiquity and birth are needless here; 'Tis impudence and money makes a peer.

Death from this life is just graduation from this grade. It's our release, our graduation, our promotion. School is out! We've finished our schooling in this grade and we pass on to the next grade.

Old religious factions are volcanoes burnt out.

I have really never considered myself a TV star. I always thought I was a neighbor who just came in for a visit.

Many access roads are too dangerous for relief workers, preventing them from carrying out assessments or reaching people in need.

I'm glad movies aren't going to please everybody, they can't. But what they have to be is recognisable. I don't equate myself with a master painter, but I think you can recognise my films.

I refuse to discuss tabloid rumors.

To understand what music has to be, you have to live for music. Who's ready to do that?

Belief has no place as far as science reaches, and may be first permitted to take root where science stops.

Every failure is a step to success. Every detection of what is false directs us towards what is true: every trial exhausts some tempting form of error.