A good smoker, like a good lover, always takes his time with a cigar.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread

When I write, the first blank page, or any blank page, means nothing to me. What means something is a page that has been filled with words.

Puns are a form of humor with words.

The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that