Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.

Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.

The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer-he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along.

The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.