I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

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.

...my heart rides the wind and my thoughts sail away - to a land below the horizon where I know you hide from me...

I trained initially as a physical chemist, and then, after becoming interested in biology, I went to medical school and learned how to be a physician. So, I'm a physician scientist.

Everything isn't black and white, but for me it might as well be.

Indifference is isolation. In difference is texture and wonder.

I believe it is my duty to share the gifts I have learned. How dare I have the tools for finding serenity and not share them with the world?

Today the fate of humankind is even more crucially linked than ever before. The boundaries between the problems of 'others' and 'our' problems are being increasingly erased.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I'm really not worth being called an artist at all.

Love is a battle, and I plan to go on fighting. To the end.

I have a gigantic ego and need to be at the top of the pile and be doing amazingly well; also, at the same time, I'm just pleased to be anywhere.

I don't care if you print something nasty about me. If it's true, fine. I don't care. But just make sure it's the truth.