It is not an easy thing to put on a wet sock.

There are moments when rather than reforming the human race I'd like to abandon it altogether and go become, say, one of Dr. O'Reilly's macaques, which have to have more sense.

That's what the movies do. They don't entertain us, they don't send the message: 'We care.' They give us lines to say, they assign us parts: John Wayne, Theda Bara, Shirley Temple, take your pick.

One has not lived until one has carried a sixty-pound dog down a sweeping flight of stairs at half-past V in the morning.

Management cares about only one thing. Paperwork. They will forgive almost anything else - cost overruns, gross incompetence, criminal indictments - as long as the paperwork's filled out properly. And in on time.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy.