Scratch an actor and you'll find an actress.

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.

Vice is nice, but liquor is quicker.

Sure, you make money writing on the coast ... but that money is like so much compressed snow. It goes so fast it melts in your hand.

I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York-the Blessed Sacrament... I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion.

... if this world were anything near what it should be there would be no more need of a Book Week than there would be a of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Why, after all, should readers never be harrowed? Surely there is enough happiness in life without having to go to books for it.