The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth.

Luck is not the hand of God.... Luck is the way the wind swirls and the dust settles eons after God has passed by.

Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.

I pity the Jews trying to get through life with only half a Bible. That's like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa.

You say what you have to say. But you have to learn to say it in such a way that the reader can see what you mean.

That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues.