“A good writer always works at the impossible.”

“When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: 'I'm a writer', and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works.”

“As good as' always spells mediocrity. But when a writer's work is in competition with all those thousands of other manuscripts that pour over an editor's desk, he cannot afford to be 'as good as'; he (or she) must be 'better than.”

“Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”

“A deadline gets a writer's work done done better and faster than any inspiration, if only because inspirations don't always come, but the deadline is always there.”

“Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion”