Writing is finally play, and there's no reason why you should get paid for playing

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.

Soar with wit. Conquer with dignity. Handle with care.

If arithmetic overflow is a fatal error, some fascist pig with a read-only mind is trying to enforce machine independence.

There's a tremendous intellectual fervor among independent filmmakers, and that has to be cultivated.

Now, more than ever, the choice between Obama and Romney will be which one do you want to ruin your country?

For the Mexican people, for the Mexican government, the very good relationship with the United States of America is, of course, essential.

A glorious life is filled with companions who have open hearts.

Whenever we find stiffness in the body, our mind should be especially supple. It is never the stiffness in our bodies that limits our practice, it is always the stiffness of our mind.

Here lies one who neither flattered nor feared any flesh.

You know, if ever there was a people who should know how to practice brotherhood, it is the American Negro and it is the people of Egypt.

At the population level, making the world more just and less unequal, while trying to figure out the toxic aspects of the urban environmental will probably help prevent a lot of psychosis.