The last paragraph in which you tell what the story is about is almost always best left out.

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.

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.

There are too many books I haven’t read, too many places I haven’t seen, too many memories I haven’t kept long enough.

A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.

Reason is the life of the law nay the common law itself is nothing else but reason. The law which is perfection of reason.

The day of judgment will be a day when the skeletons come out of the closets! And each of us will be standing there to face the record.

When a man's making love, the last thing he thinks about is war.

I have no idea what I'm going to say when I stand up to give a toast. But I do know that anything I say I find funny.

You lose in the end unless you know how the wheel is fixed or can fix it yourself.

Forgiveness is the best revenge.

May an elephant caress you with his toes

I can't go to the cinema. I go to the bathroom in a petrol station and people come in there for autographs. It's tough but I knew that was going to be the case.

Man is by definition the first and primary weed. Weeds are not the other. Weeds are us.