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.

She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.

Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.

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

How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

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