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.

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

They threw me off the haytruck about noon.

If your writing doesn`t keep you up at night, it won`t keep anyone else up either".

A home is not a museum. It doesn't have to be furnished with Picasso paintings, or Sheraton suites, or Oriental rugs, or Chinese pottery. But it does have to be furnished with things that mean something to you.

She was a little given to rehearsing things in her mind, and having imaginary triumphs over people who had upset her in one way and another.