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!

In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices

Special-interest magazines are dangerous places for writers to start out in because the writing quickly falls into a routine and people are likely to find themselves artistically exhausted when they want to work on something of their own

In America, we have the feeling of the doomed young artist. Fitzgerald was the great example of that.

No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid.

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

I never show anything to anybody until I've finished it