Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. The writer's only responsibility is to his art.

Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.

Curiosity is a mistress whose slaves decline no sacrifice.

A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can.

So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice.