Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

I've always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they're relations, they have a place in the American family. They're the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.

Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.

Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.

A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy.

We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.