The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience.
Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you.
The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trouble with it.
The air brightened, the running shadow patches were now the obverse, and it seemed to him that the fact that the day was clearing was another cunning stroke on the part of the foe, the fresh battle toward which he was carrying ancient wounds.
It wasn’t until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn’t understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.
Thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked like ninepins.
Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.
Nothing can injure a man’s writing if he’s a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there’s not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.
It’s always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret.
It seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it.
In my opinion it’s a shame that there is so much work in the world.
I don’t want money badly enough to work for it.
A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can.
I never promise a woman anything nor let her know what I’m going to give her. That’s the only way to manage them. Always keep them guessing. If you cant think of any other way to surprise them, give them a bust in the jaw.
A hack writer who would have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven ‘sure-fire’ literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.
The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He’s supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn’t part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.
The writer doesn’t need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper.
Only when the clock stops does time come to life.
In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it’s an excuse for a form of behavior.
The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.