If my Valentine you won't be, I'll hang myself on your Christmas tree.

The writer's job is not to judge, but to seek to understand.

I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.

it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.

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

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.

Any man who eats dessert is not drinking enough.