Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.

True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.

It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.

Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on.

Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.