The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.

I don't think I ever owned twenty pencils at one time. Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

The smallest coffins are the heaviest.

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