In America, we have the feeling of the doomed young artist. Fitzgerald was the great example of that.

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.

In the beginning there was the Word. Then we broke it.

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being concious of living.

Socialism is not a meritocracy. By definition it places increasingly confining restraints on those that succeed the most.

You can't walk alone. Many have given the illusion, but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values.

When the president went around the table to the country's national security leadership, Hillary was clear: We have to go get bin Laden. And our Special Operations Forces did just that.

Mundanes who involve themselves in things they know nothing about are likely to meet unpleasant endings.

Sometimes you need to ease off in order to go faster

I love the smell of the universe in the morning.

Meditation is evolution's strategy to bring out our full potential.

I could send you a bone with a file in it, only you'd eat it.