The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, near-sightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.

Love with its paraphernalia of sexuality, jealousy, nostalgia and exaltation was easier to reognize than friendship, which seemed to have (excepting athletic equipment) no paraphernalia at all.

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

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

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

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.