You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill.

I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. ... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.

People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

I am like a blind pig when I work.

The only thing that can spoil a day is people and if you can keep from making engagements, every day has no limits.