I think Shakespeare got drunk after he finished King Lear. That he had a ball writing it.

Only little boys and old men sneer at love.

Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.

I think Shakespeare got drunk after he finished King Lear. That he had a ball writing it.

Novels must have verisimilitude, and truth has little enough of that.

We were not as rich as the Rockefellers or Mellons, but we were rich enough to know how rich they were.

To most readers the word 'fiction' is an utter fraud. They are entirely convinced that each character has an exact counterpart in real life and that any small discrepancy with that counterpart is a simple error on the author's part. Consequently, they are totally at a loss if anything essential is altered. Make Abraham Lincoln a dentist, put the Gettysburg Address on his tongue, and nobody will recognize it.