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.

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.

The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.

Now working is terribly painful and I'm still having a fight with the booze. I've enlisted the help of a doctor but it's touch and go. A day for me; a day for the hootch.

I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.

A page of good prose remains invincible.

Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can't write a story.