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

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

The fact that all of us die anyway (the rumor turns out to be true) is a mere detail in the celestial glow of imagination. The artist's eyes destroy death.

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.

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.

The would-bees take their honey from the flowers of creation.

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.