“Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college.”

The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.

Oh, I never look under the hood.

A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. … A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.

There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.

I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty-everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?

We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.

Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.

Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north…As he peeked ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.

A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom- he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people– people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.

A writer’s style reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacites, his bias…it is the Self escaping into the open.

It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck.

A schoolchild should be taught grammar-for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author’s life.

I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics.

The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.

The thing I’d really like to see is the old London Bridge, with all the old buildings around it like Shakespeare’s Globe.

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.

I think American actors are much more intimidated by Shakespeare.