Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

You can dissect a joke just as you can a frog. But it tends to die on you.

A man must have something to cling to. Without that he is as a pea vine sprawling in search of a trellis.... I was all asprawl, clinging to Beauty, which is a very restless trellis.

All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self-escaping into the open.

The H-bomb rather favors small nations that doesn't as yet possess it; they feel slightly more free to jostle other nations, having discovered that a country can stick its tongue out quite far these days without provoking war, so horrible are war's consequences.