A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.

It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man.