How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.

Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.

If you want to make a million you don't have to understand money, what you have to understand is people's fears about money

Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of...recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it.

We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.

Power doesn't corrupt people; people corrupt power.