What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.

My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am as bald as an egg. However I still get around and am mean to cats.

Admite the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.

Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.