It's worth your life to order an omelette in most restaurants. You never know what you're going to get.

Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don't put them on paper.

When I'm writing, I never write more than four hours a day.

If you have a single narrator, a person like an "I" - "'I' did this" and "'I' did that" - it automatically solves the most difficult problem in writing.

It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.

My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.

It was the most haunting room I've ever seen. Because you know what's in it? All the left­overs, all the paraphernalia that the different condemned men had had with them in the "holding" cells.