Cigars must be smoked one at a time, peaceably, with all the leisure in the world. Cigarettes are of the instant, Cigars are for eternity.

Puns are a form of humor with words.

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

That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.

Tobacco is the opiate of the gentleman, the religion of the rich.

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity

I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread