If football players were armed with guns, there wouldn't be stadiums large enough to hold the crowds.

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.

The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.

There are too many books I haven’t read, too many places I haven’t seen, too many memories I haven’t kept long enough.

Just as you can’t rehearse your way to success, you can’t design your way there either.

A peevish self-willed harlotry it is.*She’s a stubborn little brat.*

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.

She's not the one I want." His words came out terse. "It's you. It's been you since...since the minute I first saw you.

They were wearing smelly blankets, they looked like Donovan fans.

There's hope at the bottom of the biggest waterfall." ~pg 426

I have no confidence in any religion that can be demonstrated only to children.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

Faith is not a commodity we either have or don't have-it is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience.

I sure do miss that woman. Smart. Funny. Sweet. She never gave me a moment's trouble." "Gosh, I'm sorry about that. I knew it was boring between you two, but not that bad.