Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)

Religions sprang up among men to deal with the sometimes terrifying aspects of existence, to make sense out of the senseless, to explain things we find inexplicable.

Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex; many don't; many respond to both. This plurality is part of our nature and not worth fretting about.

It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time—now, too, I suppose—actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness.

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