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.

The romantic idea is that everybody around a writer must suffer for his talent. I think a writer is a citizen of humanity, part of his nation, part of his family. He may have to make some compromises.

My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever

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.

Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House

I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written