No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid.

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.

Certainly there are things in life that money can’t buy, but it’s very funny – Did you ever try buying them without money.

Kate giggled. “Excellent choice.”“I always make excellent choices.”“I don’t know about that.”“Of course I do. I picked ye, didn’t I?

The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive.

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.

As a practice exercise, I'd usually just wear blindfolds around the house to allow my other senses to take me wherever I would like to go.

gossip ... is only fiction produced by non-professionals.

She should get a divorce and settle down.

I think this is every mother's worst nightmare - something dreadful happening to her child.

When educating horses there is no greater maxim than slow is fast and fast is slow.

I never dreamed I would receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, mostly because my style is so typically Austrian.