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

My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city's boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.

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

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

What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.

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

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