I went to high school in Indianapolis I learned how to walk around looking tough because everybody had to do that. I go out there occasionally and they're still doing it, walking around looking very tough because something might happen.

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.

That’s the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind.

We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.

If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?

. . . but the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.