Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

I have always thought of sophistication as rather a feeble substitute for decadence.

It's possible to disagree with someone about the ethics of non-violence without wanting to kick his face in.

A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.

I think there's something degrading about having a husband for a rival. It's humiliating if you fail and commonplace if you succeed.

I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with. And, in the end, I distilled everything down to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die.