Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

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.

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 irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.

Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.