The steady pressure to consume, absorb, participate, receive, by eye, ear, mouth, and mail involves a cruelty to intestines, blood pressure, and psyche unparalleled in history.

To construct a proper privacy, making it a privilege rather than a burden, we first need to construct a community-love, family, politics, art.

He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast.

If mankind is naturally good, he is sure going against his nature more and more of the time. It sounds like a bad joke: the paranoids are after us.

With short stories, the story-teller must have a story to tell, not merely some sweet prose to take out for a walk

The magic will which makes us see the other side of our natures-dream and disaster, catastrophe and fulfillment-is the great permanent challenge of humanity.

Old age is wasted on the elderly: the young know what to do with it-insist on something different.