If you're young enough, any kind of writing you do for a short period of time is a marvelous apprenticeship.

You must avoid giving hostages to fortune, like getting an expensive wife, an expensive house, and a style of living that never lets you aford the time to take the chance to write what you wish.

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

There are too many books I haven’t read, too many places I haven’t seen, too many memories I haven’t kept long enough.

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

I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.

Horror would not annoy a soldier any more than the sight of a hammer annoys a carpenter. It is sentimental to pretend that horror is not the tool of the soldier, just as the hammer is the tool of the carpenter. We live off death and the threat of death and we must take it calmly and use it well.... Eventually I came to enjoy killing, as a pianist enjoys the Czerny which keeps his fingers limber for the Beethoven.