The writer works in a lonely way.

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.

Don't respond when the mind snaps its fingers.

The monstrous act by definition demands a monster.

The literary scene is filled with young people now, which is a great joy. They seem fully capable of saving the world, as we failed to do when young, though heaven knows we tried.

That is one trouble about trading on a large scale.You cannot sneak out as you can when you pike along.

You are heaven's Halley's comet; we have one shot at seeing you shine.

No matter whether a person belongs to the upper ranks or the lower, if he has not put his life on the line at least once he has cause for shame.

One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.

Every working mom I know is constantly walking some kind of a tightrope of guilt.

I have a right to live my life and just be me with whoever I choose. We just do the best we can.

If you don't take it for granted that the other man will do his job, you're not an executive.