I never knew a writer's wife who wasn't beautiful.

The worst thing about film, from my point of view, is that it cripples illusions which I have encouraged people to create in their heads. Film doesn't create illusion. It makes them impossible. It is a bullying form of reality, like the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdale's.

What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.

There is no peace, I'm sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.

All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States - and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!

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

You can't help it but you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed — so you were a good man just the same.