“No one has ever been able to discover how they make this subtle sound, and what is more, no one ever will. It is a secret that has endured from the very beginning of the time of cats and will never be revealed.”

“Japanese goldfish,With your gossamer tail,You are the loveliest creatureI have ever seen.""Japanese kitten,Put your tongue back in where it belongsAnd go away.I know exactly what you are thinking.”

“You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.”

“No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined. ”

“Nobody's a natural. You work to get good and then work to get better. It's hard to stay on top.”

“It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.”

“You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.”