The best way to find out if you have any friends is to go broke. The ones that hang on longest are your friends. I don't mean the ones that hang on forever. There aren't any of those.

If you don't leave, I'll get somebody who will.

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

And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.

So by all means let's have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn't it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.

I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.