Talking is something you can't do judiciously unless you keep in practice.

When you write, you want fame, fortune and personal satisfaction. You want to write what you want to write and feel it's good, and you want this to go on for hundreds of years. You're not likely ever to get all these things, and you're not likely to give up writing and commit suicide if you don't, but that is -- and should be -- your goal. Anything else is kind of piddling.

The truth is you don't like the theater except the times when you're in a room by yourself putting the play on paper.

...What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with Life.

She grinned at me. 'You got types?' 'Only you darling - lanky brunettes with wicked jaws.

The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.

My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery.