The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

The problem with most Americans is that they don't like any question that takes more than ten seconds to answer.

I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.

I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.

The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.