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.

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and is it is cool and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit again.

Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.

One cat just leads to another." [Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).]

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.

The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.