We thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight.

Writing is a hard business...but nothing makes you feel better.

I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.

Romance was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes.

The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.

I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.

What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.