I'm a great believer in outlines.

The first newspaper I worked on was the 'Springfield Union' in Springfield, Massachusetts. I wrote over a hundred letters to newspapers asking for work and got three responses, two no's.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

You're either on the bus or off the bus.

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.

There was a time in the 1930s when magazine writers could actually make a good living. 'The Saturday Evening Post' and 'Collier's' both had three stories in each issue. These were usually entertaining, and people really went for them. But then television came along, and now of course, information technology...the new way of killing time.

You can be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested.