Wine is the most civilized thing in the world.
A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.
If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him.
Wars are caused by undefended wealth.
The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.
The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
Everyone behaves badly--given the chance.
I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.
Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.
What you do [to provide better aid is] you shut up. You never arrive in a community with any ideas.
