I started off at the high level, in the slick magazines, but they didn't use my name, they used house names. Anyway, then I went downhill to the pulps, then downhill further to the comics.

I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am. Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney.

I read all the time... I read a lot of history books.

Those big-shot writers ... could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.

I'm the most translated writer in the world, behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki and Jules Verne. And they're all dead.

Where I am they can smell out a hurricane. My house survived Hurricane Hazel, but it didn't get past Hugo.

The most important part of a story is the ending. No one reads a book to get to the middle.