Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than to read.

Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles oh, damn their measured merriment.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.

People will buy anything that is 'one to a customer.'

Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.

Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

There are two insults no human being will endure: that he has no sense of humor, and that he has never known trouble.

He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.

What is love? It is the morning and the evening star.

Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.

Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.

Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

I think ethnic and regional labels are insulting to writers and really put restrictions on them. People don't think your work is quite as universal.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people - directors, filmmakers, and writers - over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.

It is certain, indeed, that the sacred writers were apt to make great allowances for people with empty stomachs, and though I am well aware that the present profane ones think this very reprehensible, I venture to agree with the sacred writers.

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing.

You need the words, you need the script, you need the material, you need the commitment, you need the passion, it's like we depend on writers, we depend on producers, directors depend on us and once things are in the divine order as they happen.

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

There's a certain possessiveness of writers sometimes.

Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy.

I was notified on July 17 to be ready to start August 7 for an October air date. When we reached the screen we did not have a single segment ready. It was done so fast the writers never got a chance to know what it was all about.

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.

What makes me furious, not just because we're in an interview, but I don't like when writers take your words and put them somewhere else, in the wrong context in their own article about you.

Women writers have been told, forever, that our stories were not valuable. Not as valuable as men's stories about wars, business, power.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

Movies have influenced all writers, not just thriller writers.

Labels only confuse people. The smarter people recognize artists who transcend categories. But I always try to entertain. It's in my nature; writers are born to entertain. If that means working ostensibly within a genre, fine.

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

Recipe writers hate to write about heat. They despise it. Because there aren't proper words for communicating what should be done with it.

Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

Writers, all the good ones, are Natural Born Liars.

Success breeds volume, and it's just amazing how many young writers, artists, and musicians there are in town.

Writers' bedtimes vary, but few have been spared the shock of a copy editor's early wake-up call.

Some writers and producers are currently writing a sitcom for me, so we'll see what happens there. I'm somewhat reluctant to talk about some of the upcoming projects that I'm working on; I've a lot of stuff on the go, including five pictures that I'm looking at producing.

What I always meant by that was that I do believe that a lot of directors, and writers, and sometimes producers just lose their edge because they haven't seen anybody or talked to anybody or been with anybody who isn't a kind of replica of themselves for a long period of time.