A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.

Courage is grace under pressure.

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.