All writers - all people - have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory.

The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.

It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.

I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.

It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?

Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.