Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.

I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.

She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.

Today we say goodbye to a proud warrior. As we leave, each of us will take our members of [USS} Midway with us...you guys were the 'Magic.' It was a privilege to sail with you.

There is a paradox in pride: it makes some men ridiculous but prevents others from becoming so.

I'd rather be a football coach. That way you only lose eleven games a year.

Ghosts cannot be put on the witness stand, or have their fingerprints taken. They are completely proof against proof.

The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.

Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

I live in the 17th century. I don't have a computer. I don't look at the internet. I use a cellphone, and that's about my only connection to the modern world.

When people call something "original," 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.

A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own.

The thing about hearing loss is that no one can see it. Most people are so impatient; they just assume that the person with hearing loss is being rude, or slow-witted.