You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.

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

God damn it, you've got to be kind.

Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.