Writing is like a contact sport, like football. Why do kids play football? They can get hurt on any play, can't they? Yet they can't wait until Saturday comes around so they can play on the high school team, or the college team, and get smashed around. Writing is like that. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it!

A good editor understands what you're talking and writing about and doesn't meddle too much.

Curiously, the United States is full of writers who have one big work in their life and that's all.

When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.

The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.

Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy.

Posterity makes the judgments. There are going to be a lot of surprises in store for everybody.