“I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.”

“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.”

“In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.”

“The public is always relieved to find that once the chief officers of state are elected they do not sincerely want change.”

“You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.”

“As I looked back over my life, I realized that I enjoyed nothing--not art, not sex--more than going to the movies. ”

“I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities.”