Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.

Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it's a kind of risky trade.

The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.

Divorce transforms habit into drama.

When you make a bet, you're saying something.

I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients.