Without a reader, I cannot write. It's like a kiss: they cannot be done alone.

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

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.

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 short story is the literature of the nomad.

Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.

Without a reader, I cannot write. It's like a kiss: they cannot be done alone.