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.

A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.

At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded.

I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal

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

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75