I think what's really hard is making sense and making what you write clear and smooth-flowing.

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

I think a writer is not an ideal husband... Writers tend to get off into their own heads and not notice the people that they're living with, or they get irritable with the people that they're living with when the people insist on being noticed.

A picture's worth a thousand words? A library card's worth millions.

An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again.

When money gets too far away from actual, physical, real equity and property it gets too abstract and too distantly derived and then suddenly it's not worth anything anymore. And the same is true of language.

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.