The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.

If you're not tough it's hard to survive in this world; and if you're not kind then you don't deserve to survive.

I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.