“The act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even re-writing’s fun. You’re getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not.”

The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.

Americans want to go to heaven without dying.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody’s guess.

If you wonder which is the stronger sex, watch which one twists the other around her little finger.

I myself have known some profoundly thoughtful dogs.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

For one thing, she pronounced flowers ‘flars’ and I couldn’t let it slide.

Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.

Let the meek inherit the earth — they have it coming to them.

I can feel a thing I cannot touch and touch a thing I cannot feel. The first is sad and sorry, the second is your heart.

I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good.

She wasn’t much to look at but she was something to think about.

Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going.

With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.

If you’ve had a bad experience with an agent, you have to move past it.

An automobile has about 10,000 moving parts, right?

So you have to do a lot of things in order for things to move forward.

Our god is the thing, or person, which we think most precious, for whom we would make the greatest sacrifice, and who moves our heart with the warmest love.

Any normal and fair-minded person would have a perfect right to be concerned if a group of Romanian people suddenly moved in next door.

Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing.

If we have moved back to a regime of regular financial crises – like the one we had from the 1870s to the 1930s.

Having established that good ideas do indeed come in from the cold, start on the fringes and become mainstream, can we make any predictions about what the next move will be?