Well, I spent six or seven years after high school trying to work myself up. Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. And it's a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And always to have to get ahead of the next fella. And still — that's how you build a future.

After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.

The word "now" is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.

You specialize in something until one day it is specializing in you.

Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?