“Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.”

“If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”

“If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.”

“In polite society, we call our obsessions hobbies.”

“It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.”

“We always assumed the aliens would have to at least be alive to invade. Not even H.G. Wells expected an invasion of ghosts.”

“As it happened, all three of us turned out to be real writers--a coincidence almost too large to be termed mere coincidence in a society where literally tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of college students aspire to the writer's trade and where bare hundreds actually break through.”