My attitudes have changed, but somebody would have to read all my books to find out how they have

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.

A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.

Writing is the only way to change the world without leaving bed.

I wanted to break the record, of course, and become the youngest person to sail around the world solo and unassisted.

Life is a journey I don't have a map for.

If a king tries to start a war, a mother should go to him and forbid it.

There is only what is and that's it. What should be is a dirty lie.

And as an afterthought, this too must be told: Some people have taken pure bullshit and turned it into gold.

The interesting thing about cybercrime and the whole cyber world is that many of the people that are most proficient in it are young people, really young people.

If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument

Respected, I almost want to be revered, that's what I'm chasing.