Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.

Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.

The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

It has always seemed to me that the only painless death must be that which takes the intelligence by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well and if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it.

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.