Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney.
Critics themselves, they used to tear me up.
If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.
I know an awful lot of Hollywood people, who are so self-important, I can't understand it.
Hemingway hated me. I sold 200 million books, and he didn't. Of course most of mine sold for 25 cents, but still... you look at all this stuff with a grain of salt.
