It heartens me to think of Verdi who composed thundering operas in his eighties; Michelangelo who did fine work in his ninetieth year, and Titian, who painted better than ever in his one hundredth.

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 am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them.

I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril.

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

I never wrote anything that was published until I was forty.