No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys the writing, even if he doesn’t get paid for 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.

Success doesn't come to procrastinators, but only to men of action

Pretty much every day consists of me trying to save the world.

When life gives you lemons, throw them at the zombies.

Part of me likes words as music sabotage, and part of me wonders why anyone would waste their time liking anything to do with sabotage.

The whole man is involved, the mind, the heart and the will, and a common cause of spiritual depression is the failure to realize that the Christian life is a whole life, a balanced life.

Physics without mathematics is meaningless.

I guess what inspires me is when I am watching somebody else do something that really has an impact on me. That inspires me to want to do that in return.

Optimism is a philosophy based on the belief that basically life is good, that, in the long run, the good in life overbalances the evil.

Texas has long been known as the nation's largest energy producer, but we are equally proud of our distinction as the nation's leading energy innovator.

Anxiety is the rust of life, destroying its brightness and weakening its power. A childlike and abiding trust in Providence is its best preventive and remedy.