It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination.

The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.

America is a wonderful country! I mean it! No honest writer would challenge that statement! The human comedy never runs out of material! it never lets you down!

Nonfiction is never going to die.

I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I'm a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them.

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

Even hostile parodies admit from the start that the target has a distinct voice.