“If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away. ”

“I write poetry not for publication but merely to kill time. Airplanes are a good place to write poetry and then throw it away. My collected works are mostly on the vomit bags of Lufthansa.”

“I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.”

“My pen.’ Funny, I wrote that without noticing. ‘The torch’, ‘the paper’, but ‘my pen’. That shows what writing means to me, I guess. My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It’s about the most important thing I own.”

“If pens doubled as bullets, I bet few writers would want to write about war.”

“I am a writer. The proof of how I am feeling is always in my pen.”