“A good editor understands what you're talking and writing about and doesn't meddle too much.”

“A writer has to live with a sense of honor.”

“All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.”

“An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.”

“At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded.”

“Curiously, the United States is full of writers who have one big work in their life and that's all.”

“Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy.”

“Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.”

“I am forced to say that I have many fiercer critics than myself.”

“I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal.”

“I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.”

“I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written.”

“I'm not as hopeful as I was when I was young.”

“In America, we have the feeling of the doomed young artist. Fitzgerald was the great example of that.”

“In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.”

“It's those damn critics again.”

“Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House.”

“My attitudes have changed, but somebody would have to read all my books to find out how they have.”

“My views naturally have mellowed. Most of the critics have been more or less nice to me.”

“No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid.”

“People who light up like Roman candles come down in the dark very quickly.”

“Posterity makes the judgments. There are going to be a lot of surprises in store for everybody.”

“The last paragraph, in which you tell what the story is about, is almost always best left out.”

“There are too many books I haven't read, too many places I haven't seen, too many memories I haven't kept long enough.”

“Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life.”

“Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.”