He once told Allie and I that if he'd had to shoot anybody, he wouldn't've known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were.

It's one of those places that are supposed to be very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming in the window.

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

You think of the book you'd most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it.

It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.

The existence of God, the why of life, was all that really only a question of glands?

I could happily lie down and die sometimes.