There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to ….

It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll's house. I thought that was silly as soon as I ….

If you liked a book, don't meet the author.

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It….

Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a li….

It's fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational education o….

You don't get rich, you don't often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jail house. Once in a long while you get….

I'm in a wild mood tonight. I want to go dance in the foam. I hear the banshees calling..

The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous..

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has becom….

You can't have everything, even in California.

Shake your business up and pour it. I haven't got all day..

A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's lime juice and nothing else..

Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth..

May I wish for you the knowledge...that marriages do not take place, they are made by hand; that there is always an element of discipline involved; t….

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon..

When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature..

From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away..

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers..

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can ….

I hung up. It was a good start, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hidden under the desk..