Age is not different from earlier life as long as you're sitting down

The germ of a story is a new and simple element introduced into an existing situation or mood.

Talent is what you possess; genius is what possesses you.

They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much.

Put cotton in your ears and pebbles in your shoes. Pull on rubber gloves. Smear Vaseline over your glasses, and there you have it: instant old age.

It is the fear of being as dependent as a young child, while not being loved as a child is loved, but merely being kept alive against one's will.

Writing offers fairly large rewards to a few successful people, but the rewards come late, and most writers are failures.

Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.

Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens

Any fiction should be a story. In any story there are three elements: persons, a situation, and the fact that in the end something has changed. If nothing has changed, it isn't a story.

Going back to Hemingway's work after several years is like going back to a brook where you had often fished and finding the woods as deep and cool as they used to be.

Sometimes you find a lie, and sometimes it finds you.

Writing to you like this is the same as saying your name when I've woken up late, feeling sick, tasting rot. It's pointless, but it happens.

Days are made to be filled with laughter.

But there's a beginning in an end, you know? It's true that you can't reclaim what you had, but you can lock it up behind you. Start fresh.

That is the definition of faith - acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove.

A three-year diet of rubber chicken and occasional crow.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

Nixon was a conservative who’s way more liberal than his party can admit, and Obama’s a liberal who’s way more conservative than his party can admit.

Look - The moon thumbs through night's book. Finds a lake where nothing is printed. Draws a straight line. That's all it can. That's enough. Thick line. Straight toward you. - Look.

Integrity may be about little things as much or more than big ones.