If you can't write like New York, you have no business living in New York and making New York the locale of your stories.

She was a little given to rehearsing things in her mind, and having imaginary triumphs over people who had upset her in one way and another.

I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn't have the money and I didn't have the woman.

Love, when you get fear in it, it's not love any more. It's hate.

Yes, I have actually mined coal, and distilled liquor, as well as seen a girl in a pink dress, and seen her take it off. I am 54 years old, weigh 220 pounds, and look like the chief dispatcher of a long-distance driving concern. I am a registered Democrat. I drink.

Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.

If you have to do it, you can do it.

A guitar has moonlight in it.

They threw me off the haytruck about noon.

A home is not a museum. It doesn't have to be furnished with Picasso paintings, or Sheraton suites, or Oriental rugs, or Chinese pottery. But it does have to be furnished with things that mean something to you.