I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?

Not too many people work in a job where, waiting out there are three or four hundred people who are paid to tear apart what you've done. And often they are brighter than you are, or they know more about the subject than you do, or they wish they had written a book themselves, or done a lot better. Or they just don't like it! And you have to live with it.

When this is over, I'm not going to be the same guy. I am going to live as if I were a great man.

I think young people ought to seek the experience that is going to knock them off center.

No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

You write that first draft really to see how it's going to come out.