To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in words and emotions …

One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.

I'm a lazy writer. My idea of heaven is not writing. On the other hand, I'm obviously compulsive about it.

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of …

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.