In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford.

There was a writer in the '20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn't tell you what it was.

When you demand the nature of my motives, you reveal the style of your thinking to be callow, captious, superficial, craven, uncertain and impudent.

A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone's written the story. He's supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.

The inscrutability [of economics] is perhaps not unintentional. It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters.

I suspect that the word (art) was invented by second-rate intelligences to describe the incomprehensible activities of their betters.

This is no science, this is art, where equations fall away to elements like resolving chords, and where always prevails a symmetry either explicit or multiplex, but always of a crystalline serenity.