Work was like cats were supposed to be: if you disliked and feared it and tried to keep out if its way, it knew at once and sought you out and jumped on your lap and climbed all over you to show how much it loved you. Please God, he thought, don’t let me die in harness.
Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator they have a claim on, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food.
Whatever part drink may play in the writer’s life, it must play none in his or her work.
Now and then I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time.
Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.
When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I’m going to show them, this time.
More always means worse.
Being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European...
Twentieth century music is like paedophilia. No matter how persuasively and persistently its champions urge their cause, it will never be accepted by the public at large, who will continue to regard it with incomprehension, outrage and repugnance.
If you are using an adverb, you have got the verb wrong.
I was never an Angry Young Man. I am angry only when I hit my thumb with a hammer.
Death has this much to be said for it: You don’t have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you – free.
A blonde girl wearing a man’s shirt but in all other visible respects unmanly to the point of outright effeminacy.
Outside every fat man there is an even fatter man trying to close in.
It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.
Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence.
A German wine label is one of the things life’s too short for, a daunting testimony to that peculiar nation’s love of detail and organization.
Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.
One of the great benefits of organised religion is that you can be forgiven your sins, which must be a wonderful thing. I mean, I carry my sins around with me, there’s nobody there to forgive them.
The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings.