Hold your pen and spare your voice.

The writer's way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats?

[On William Lyon Phelps's Happiness:] It is second only to a rubber duck as the ideal bathtub companion. It may be held in the hand without causing muscular fatigue ... and it may be read through before the water has cooled. And if it slips down the drain pipe, all right, it slips down the drain pipe.

Art is a form of catharsis emotional release, purging, cleansing, purifying.

Guns aren't lawful; nooses give; gas smells awful. So you might as well live.

Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.

All those writers who write about their own childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.