...the indispensable requirement for a good newspaperman - as eager to tell a lie as the truth.

You're gambling with something vital. Most writers get smashed egos.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.

I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.

We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore; we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.