To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.

How can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives [sex], as if-jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts-we were describing the changing of a flat tire?

When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.

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

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.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination he inflates his capacity for evil.