All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.

Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.

I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I've encountered some unnecessary resistance that's because most of the traffic is going the other way.

I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets -- the seventeen who got away.

There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author's self- effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice.

In the end, for all our differences and conflicts, most women and men share the same food, work, shelter, bed, life, joy, anguish, and fate. We need each other.

Passion, sexual passion, may lead to marriage, but cannot sustain marriage. The purpose of marriage is the raising of children, for which patience, not passion, is the necessary foundation.