The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.

And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.

I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.

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

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.

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.