America -- rather, the United States -- seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warm-hearted, over-friendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures; its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The chuckle among the nations of the world.

You lose in the end unless you know how the wheel is fixed or can fix it yourself.

I don't know what it is that makes a writer go to his desk in his shut-off room day after day after year after year unless it is the sure knowledge that not to have done the daily stint of writing that day is infinitely more agonizing than to write.

I like any place that isn't here.

Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.

No one in the United States has the right to own millions of acres of American land, I don't care how they came by it.

If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there's something wrong with American politics.