I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular.

I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.

An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.

The circus comes as close to being the world in microcosm as anything I know; in a way, it puts all the rest of show business in the shade.

Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your subject.

Loneliness is a strange gift.

I have no warm up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink.