Love is a chain of love as nature is a chain of life.

No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.

I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.

The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.

I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about.

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years.

Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.

All literature is gossip.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can't have too many friends because then you're just not really friends.

It is the want to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.

Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

I can see every monster as they come in.

A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.

Mick Jagger is about as sexy as a pissing toad.

Fame is only good for one thing - they will cash your check in a small town.

Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.

Love is a chain of love as nature is a chain of life.

I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.

Love, having no geography, knows no boundaries.

Its a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.

A conversation is a dialogue not a monologue. Thats why there are so few good conversations due to scarcity two intelligent talkers seldom meet.

Disco is the best floor show in town. Its very democratic boys with boys girls with girls girls with boys blacks and whites capitalists and Marxists Chinese and everything else all in one big mix.

The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.

And since gin to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara, her attractions at once dissembled.

New York is the only real city-city.

Of course there is a Santa Claus. It’s just that no single somebody could do all he has to do. So the Lord has spread the task among us all. That’s why everybody is Santa Claus. I am. You are.

There were hints of sunrise on the rim of the sky, yet it was still dark, and the traces of morning color were like goldfish swimming in ink.

The wind is us it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields.

It takes a lot of bad writing to get to a little good writing.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.