Writing about writing is a bit like talking about a conversation you are having; it tends to obscure desperation about where the next word is coming from.

People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind.

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.

Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.

Lyda was an exuberant, even a dramatic gardener.... She was always holding up a lettuce or a bunch of radishes with an air of resolute courage, as though she had shot them herself.

Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.

There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.

No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.

My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.

The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.

In these days of faith-cures, and hypnotism, and telepathy, and subliminalities – why, the simple old world grows very confusing. But rarely, very rarely novel.

There is no elevator to success. You have to take the stairs.

The meanings get lost and the teachings get tossed and you don't know what you're going to do next.

On a scale of one to ten, how punk am I? Apple. I don't use your scale.

It will be cheering to know that many people are skillful chessplayers, though in many instances their brains, in a general way, compare unfavorably with the cognitive faculties of a rabbit.

She eyes me like a pisces.

To some people, the fact that I am not married, or don't have children, would be the reason I have written a book on punctuation.

Everything that possesses life dies if it has to live in uncongenial surroundings.

Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and illiterate sport fishermen.