When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.

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.

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

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.

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

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

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.