Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. |
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable. |
Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world. |
That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit. |
What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power. |
All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life. |
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two. |
Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two. |
Homesickness is nothing Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. |
The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony. |
Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction. |
I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind. |
Art is the triumph over chaos. |
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego. |
When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places. |
People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy. |
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness. |
I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone. |
It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong. |
For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty. |