I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.

For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.

That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.

I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.

[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).

Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.