We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?

Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.

You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood- and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life.

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.

It is the loving, not the loved, woman who feels loveable.

If you train people properly, they won't be able to tell a drill from the real thing. If anything, the real thing will be easier.

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.