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

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.

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

Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.

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.

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

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