A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature.
There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is Fascism. For Fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live or work under Fascism.
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.
Every day above earth is a good day.