... a man is a very important thing-maybe more important than a star.

He never fell, never slipped back, never flew.

The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.

I think there must have been some other girl printed somewhere in his heart, for he was a man of love and his wife was not a woman to show her feelings.

A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one.

... every little boy thinks he invented sin.

I am writing this from what we Americans call Yurrp. In Yurrp writers are taken as seriously as Lana Turner's legs are in America - a ridiculous situation.