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"I began using pseudonyms early in my career, when I was being paid a quarter a cent a word for my work, and when I had to write a lot to earn a living. Sometimes I had three or four stories in a single magazine without the editor knowing they were all by me."
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"We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God's feet; before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God's share in it is felt as a tribute which we must pay out of 'our own' pocket, a deduction from the time which ought, we feel, to be 'our own'. A man starts a new job with a sense of vocation and, perhaps, for the first week still keeps the discharge of the vocation as his end, taking the pleasures and pains from God's hand, as they came, as 'accidents'. But in the second week he is beginning to 'know the ropes': by the third, he has quarried out of the total job his own plan for himself within that job, and when he can pursue this he feels that he is getting no more than his rights, and when he cannot, that he is being interfered."

"If I went to work in a factory the first thing I'd do is join a union."

"Employment stereotypes you."

"The work I did in Vertigo meant nothing if no one cared about the movie. Luckily, Vertigo had a revival and people had begun to recognize there was something special and it gained in reputation. But it just as well could have ended up rotting in film cans somewhere."

"Transferring successfully to the next generation means producing work that's as good as or better than the work of the first generation that founded the agency."
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"I try to keep all my novels in print. Sometimes publishers don't agree with me as to their worth."

"I have a book coming out in September, for example, where the plot concerns counterfeiting, and I had to do a lot of research on that. Or on any legal matters, for example, I have to do a lot of research online."

"I never take ideas from the headlines. I feel that if a story is good enough, a real story that is, then it's already been covered by the media, and if it's not good enough, why would I want to bother with it?"

"I enjoy what I do every minute of the day, even when the going gets tough. When I first began writing, I used to work at a desk in the bedroom, of a small development house. My three sons all under the age of 3 would come running in and out of the room every minute."

"I would like to win the Pulitzer Prize. I would like to win the Nobel Prize. I would like to win a Tony award for the Broadway musical I'm now working on. Aside from these, my aspirations are modest ones."

"I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot."

"It seemed to me... that the only valid people to deal with crime were cops, and I would like to make the lead character, rather than a single person, a squad of cops."

"It's a matter of style. The Evan Hunter style and the Ed McBain style are very, very different."

"I would certainly never suggest that any lesbian should be ashamed of her sexual preference."
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