“You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.”

You can’t eat language but it eases thirst.

One’s fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.

The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime

Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.

We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.

Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.

You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.

Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.

Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.

The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

Some men are by nature explorers; my nature is to stay under the same moon and stars, and if the weather is wet, under the same roof. It’s a strange world, why make it stranger?

There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go – if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall.

How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.

Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.

Composing was more difficult than writing things down.

Ian Callaghan will go down as one of the game’s truly great players.

The hawk swoops down on its prey, so does the Indian. In his lament he is like an animal.

Know who you are, because that’s how you will be cast at first. Then you can be Meryl Streep further down the road.

I know that Oswald killed Kennedy. Now, was he pushed? Encouraged to do it by outsiders? Possibly. Possibly. Was he sitting down with Fidel Castro? No.

You can’t leave footprints in the sands of time while sitting down.

In Italy, or France, we take it very slow. For example, we would have a lunch break of an hour or more. Just sitting down at the table, chitchatting.

He should not remain standing while he considers what he ought to do, as though the fate of a human being were a mere trifle; rather let him condescend to sit down for awhile.