The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happ'iness.

The mad also laugh, or is that what Freud and the others discovered perhaps, that only the mad laugh?

The most solid advice … for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

The only time you don't fail is the last time you try anything -- and it works.

The people you like when you meet them and while you know them, and the people you remember fondly, are invariably people who have a sense of comedy, not just a sense of humor.

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;

To write successful dialogue the author must have access to the mind of all his characters, but the reader must not perceive any more than he would in real life.

Writers are a fascinating breed, because there are so many kinds of them, they are made by so many' circumstances, conditions, and mysteries, and there are so many ways for writing to be done.

Writing fails because the writer does not know enough about his material. If he knows enough he will feel enough.