The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost man. One would not want as a reader a man who did not appreciate the finesse of a double play.

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

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.

The short story is the literature of the nomad.

To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

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