The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.

If you liked a book, don't meet the author

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

Tall, aren't you?" she said. "I didn't mean to be." Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.

I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk.

The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences.