If you try to create a type, you may end with nothing. If you do a good job of creating an individual, you may succeed at creating a type.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

If you're in love it ought to make you happy. You ought to laugh.

Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.

I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.

The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.

I was haunted always by my other life-my drab room in the Bronx, my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day's letter from Alabama-would it come and what would it say?-my shabby suits, my poverty, and love. While my friends were launching decently into life I had muscled my inadequate bark into midstream... I was a failure-mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home.