I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.

I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing. ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.

To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.

Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.

My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.

What we owe men is some freedom from their part in a murderous game in which they kick each other to death with one foot, bracing themselves on our various comfortable places with the other.

People say, "Why do you call your kids up, why do you worry like that?" And I say, "I was raised like that." My grandmother looked at my father with the same eyes when he was sixty and she was eighty-five.