Posterity makes the judgments. There are going to be a lot of surprises in store for everybody.

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.

The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.

All my life I've been taught how to die, but no one ever taught me how to grow old.

I do think we should be provided with a new body about the age of thirty or so when we have learnt to attend to it with consideration.

I had a career that was very short, but it had a lot of thrills.

Stay true to yourself and the answer will become clear

Gentle with the drugs, heavy with the love

I've done an informal, anecdotal survey about marriage, and I've found no evidence that it brings happiness.

To say that God's sovereignty is limited by man's freedom is to make man sovereign.

Perfect love means putting up with other peoples shortcomings, feeling no surprise at their weaknesses, finding encouragement even in the slightest evidence of good qualities in them.

Mercutio: "If love be rough with you, be rough with love.