The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.

Children drown, beautiful women are mangled in automobile accidents, cruise ships founder, and men die lingering deaths in mines and submarines, but you will find none of this in my accounts.

We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual.

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

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.