Quotes About Author

Cynicism is a cheap emotion, a craven substitute for thought and action.

Say what you like about my bloody murderous government ' I says, 'but don't insult me poor bleedin' country.

Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.

Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere -- particularly if they form loops.

A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though, I keep a journal, a record book, and most everything begins in the form of notes scribbled down on the pages of that journal.

Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity: the itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things.

As to the charge that I am a cranky old man, I plead guilty.

R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.

I always write with my .357 Magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere.

obedience is such a fundamental habit of the contemporary American mind that any kind of disobedience is regarded as a form of insanity.

and various forms of mental illness, including evangelical Protestantism.

Regrettably I have found it unavoidable to write some harsh words about my seasonal employer the National Park Service

that the sound of Jack Burns singing one of Burns' own songs had been a form of illusion, the actualization of memory and possibly desire rather than a direct perception.

When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.

American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.

A play is fiction -- and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

Your system was liable to periodical convulsions...business crises at intervals of five to ten years, which wrecked the industries of the nation.

The folly of men not their hard heartedness was the great cause of the world s poverty.

Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.

My theory is that the Supernatural is the Impossible, and what is called the supernatural is only something in the laws of nature of which we have been hitherto ignorant.

In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern.

If at times thou canst not comprehend the language of my thoughts, at times also I hear sweet enigmas in that of thy emotions.

Reflect in terror the scorching sun: dive at your mirror and drown within.