Until now when we have started to talk about the uniqueness of America we have almost always ended by comparing ourselves to Europe. Toward her we have felt all the attraction and repulsions of Oedipus

When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.

The problem for us is less to discover the way it really is than to see the meaning of the way.

Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.

I write to discover what I think.

The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.

While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.