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

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.

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

Divorce transforms habit into drama.

Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.

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.

It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it's funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.