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

In 1844, Karl Marx said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." He said this at a time when opium and opium derivatives were the only painkillers. And he said it helped a little. He might as well have said, "Religion is the aspirin of the people."

Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction.

Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers

A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.

Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.