The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.

Since nothing is free, to each his price.

Love, like a sense of humor, is now claimed by everyone even though Love, like a sense of humor, is rather more rare than not, and to most of us poor muddlers unbearable at full strength.

How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.

The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.

The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world.

a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)