The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.

Mothers born on relief have their babies on relief. Nothingness, truly, seems to be the condition of these New York people. They are nomads going from one rooming house to another, looking for a toilet that functions.

Art is a profession, not a shrine.

Sometimes one has the feeling of an almost supernatural character to the shifts and changes in our national mood. They appear beyond the prose of cause and effect.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

It's one of the things writing students don't understand. They write a first draft and are quite disappointed, or often should be disappointed. They don't understand that they have merely begun, and that they may be merely beginning even in the second or third draft.

Here in the city the worst thing that can happen to a nation has happened: we are a people afraid of its youth.