“In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.”

Writers who can’t invent stories often substitute style for narrative. They remind me of the painter who couldn’t paint people, so he painted chairs.

All men are Jews, though few men know it.

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.

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

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?

Fruit of all the kinds that the country produced were laid before him; he ate very little, but from time to time a liquor prepared from cocoa, and of an aphrodisiac nature.

I ate too many Frosted Flakes. I don’t remember what I said last night.

You guys make the rules up, so a foul is a foul. It doesn’t matter if a guy is bigger and stronger. It’s not my fault I ate my Frosted Flakes when I was little, and you ate Wheaties.

A panda walks into a tea room and ordered a salad and ate it. Then it pulled out a pistol, shot the man in the next table dead, and walked out.

Since Eve ate the apple, much depends on dinner.

My mother kept the house clean and we ate good.

I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me,

But if there was a mini-comic here in my hand, I’d read it while I ate my lunch.