Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.

The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: its the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.

Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.

What's impossible not to notice, though - it's all around us - is the diminution of American prose: How pedestrian it has become. Pick up any short story and listen to its voice, the tedious easy vernacular that mistakes transcription for realism. This would display an understandable pragmatism if it were a pandering to common-denominator readers; but it is, in fact, a kind of hifalultin literary ideology, the less-is-more Hemingway legacy put through an up-to-the-minute industrial blender.

Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.