If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

Really the writer doesn't want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.

...I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.