You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.

Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.

Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.

Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.

...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.

I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.