A lot of novelists start late-Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.

If you can't write like New York, you have no business living in New York and making New York the locale of your stories.

That's all it takes, one drop of fear to curdle love into hate.

A lot of novelists start late-Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.

They threw me off the haytruck about noon.

I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called.

I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake