A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.

I certainly admire people who do things.