I have heard of novels started in the middle, at the end, written in patches to be joined together later, but I have never felt the slightest desire to do this.

Perhaps that suspicion of fraud enhances the flavor.

When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.

I thank God daily for the good fortune of my birth, for I am certain I would have made a miserable peasant.

A whim, a passing mood, readily induces the novelist to move hearth and home elsewhere. He can always plead work as an excuse to get him out of the clutches of bothersome hosts.

The fools ran after me and I ran after the whores, foolish though I realized such a proceeding to be.

I must be like the princess who felt the pea through seven mattresses; each book is a pea.