“I never said a bad word about him. The whole time the two of your were together. Not one bad thing.”

“Writers are funny about reviews: when they get a good one they ignore it-- but when they get a bad review they never forget it. Every writer I know is the same way: you get a hundred good reviews, and one bad, andyou remember only the bad. For years, you go on and fantasize about the reviewer who didn't like your book; you imagine him as a jerk, a wife-beater, a real ogre. And, in the meantime, the reviewer has forgotten all about the whole thing. But, twenty years later, the writer still remembers that one bad review.”

“If I were to say, "God, why me?" about the bad things, then I should have said, "God, why me?" about the good things that happened in my life.”

“And I saw then and there you take a man half-bad and a women half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between.”

“I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for awhile after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody.They may be teaching that still.Another thing they taught was that no one was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, ‘You know – you never wrote a story with a villain in it.’I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.”

“I cannot forget two things in my whole life; the bad days I have suffered and good days I have enjoyed”