“I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.”

“The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.”

“What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.”

“This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.”

“The writer who is a real writer is a rebel who never stops.”

“I can't hate for long. It isn't worth it.”

“In getting from Windsor to Detroit there is a choice between a free tunnel and a toll bridge, which turned out to be a short ride for a dollar, which I mentioned to the toll-collector who said, 'One of those things,' impelling me to remark to my cousin, 'Almost everything said by people one sees for only an instant is something like poetry. Precise, incisive, and just right, and the reason seems to be that there isn't time to talk prose. This suggests several things, the most important of which is probably that a writer ought not to permit himself to feel that he has all the time in the world in which to write his story or play or novel. He ought to set himself a time-limit, and the shorter the better. And he ought to do a lot of other things while he is working within this time-limit, so that he will always be under pressure, in a hurry, and therefore have neither the inclination nor the time to be fussy, which is the worst thing that happens to a book while it's being written.”