The reason we write fiction is because it's so much easier to exist spending part of each day in an imaginary world.

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch: everything stops.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.

Take life seriously but none of the people in it.

Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?