"[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start."(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)"
"She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up."
"I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit."
"As for Gussie Finknottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming on sight."
"There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine."
"One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation."