Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I'm a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time.

Oh, a lion hunter in the jungle dark, And a sleeping drunkard up in central park, and a Chinese dentist and a British queen All fit together in the same machine. Nice, nice, such very different people in the same device!

The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

You know — we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. "'My God, my God — ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.

No one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

One of [ways being lucky] was to go to school during the Great Depression because teaching became a plum job.