1. “The attraction of cynicism was that it so often put you in the right, as if being right led directly to happiness.”
2. “I can be glib and truthful all at once.”
3. “When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that’s the end. Here’s another who’s never going to write well again.”
4. “Usually by the time I finish a book tour I’ve just about had it with the book.”
5. “It’ no secret that in my books I’m trying to make comic and the serious rub up against each other just as closely and uncomfortably as I can.”
6. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. It’s a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.”
7. “To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.”
8. “Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.”
9. “Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They’re about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren’t necessarily about that.”
10. “If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what’s funny in the joke.”
11. “In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.”
12. “I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.”
13. “People often ask me how I make things funny. I don’t make things funny.”
14. “Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.”
15. “Not everyone writes well from a child’s point of view.”
16. “Knowing and knowing what to do about it were to different things.”
17. People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail”.”
18. “A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.”
19. “There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.”
20. “Writers are people who put pen to paper every day.”
21. “Ultimately your theme will find you. You don’t hav to go looking for it.”
22. “People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny.”
23. “The other possibility was that there was no right thing to say that the choice wasn’t between right and wrong but between wrong, more wrong, and as wrong as you can get.”
24. “Stories worked much the same way… A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.”
25. “And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don’t take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.”
26. “It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.”
27. “When you don’t know what to do, try something ; if that doesn’t work, try something else.”
28. “You can’t possibly judge your ability to control something until you’ve experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?.”
29. “The world is divided between kids who grow up wanting to be their parent and those like us, who grow up wanting to be anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.”
30. “People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.”
