A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

I do not need to get used to your silence. I already know it. I quite possibly love all of it.

One cat just leads to another. The place is so damned big it doesn't really seem as though there were many cats until you see them all moving like a mass migration at feeding time.

I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.

I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it.

The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.