“There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets… when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.”

“Your street, rich street or poor
Used to always be sure, on your street
There's a place in your heart you know from the start
Can't be complete outside of the street
Keep moving on through the joy and the pain
Sometimes you got to look back
To the street again
Would you prefer all those castles in Spain?
Or the view of your street from your window pane?”

“When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.”

“Any man who undertakes to write a play is either a damn fool or a hero, I don't know which. When you write a book, you pull it out of the typewriter and that's that. When you write a play you've got to go on with the producer and the director and the actors and the rehearsals and the …”

“Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper… sharp pencils… typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to the desk… roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter… and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.”

“My run is like Machine Gun Kelly, with a black skully, put one in your belly, leave you smelly, then take your Pelle Pelle”

“I rail against writers who talk about the loneliness of it all — what do they want, a crowd looking over their typewriters? Or those who talk about having to stare at a blank page — do they want someone to write on it?”

“take a writer away from his typewriter
and all you have left
is
the sickness
which started him
typing
in the
beginning”

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things only because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

“Your only responsibility as a writer is to be true to the story that has chosen you as its writer.”