When I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my checkbook.

Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.

The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.

There's nothing so obscene and depressing as an American Christmas.

The majority of American writers today have chosen passive non-resistance to things as they are, producing sloughs of poetry about their personal angst and anomie, cascades of short stories and rivers of novels obsessed with the nuances of domestic relationships - suburban hanky-panky - chic boutique shopping mall literary soap opera. When they do speak out on matters of controversy they attack not the evils of our time but fellow writers who may insist on complaining.

If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.