All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time. All things truly wicked start from an innocence. Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut. An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools. If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast. A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not. There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges. If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal. | 
