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

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.

Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.

If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone.

The short story is the literature of the nomad.

For these are not as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are temporary encampment and outposts of the civilization that we - you and I - shall build.