Love, when you get fear in it, it's not love any more. It's hate.

You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it’s working on; then you can write a novel.

A guitar has moonlight in it.

Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.

Stealing a man's wife, that's nothing, but stealing his car, that's larceny.

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.

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.