You could do so much for me if you just would. If you just knew. I am I and you are you and I know it and you don't know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me.

The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.

The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.

Curiosity is a mistress whose slaves decline no sacrifice.

I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.