How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly that we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.

The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost man. One would not want as a reader a man who did not appreciate the finesse of a double play.

Love with its paraphernalia of sexuality, jealousy, nostalgia and exaltation was easier to reognize than friendship, which seemed to have (excepting athletic equipment) no paraphernalia at all.

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.

There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.