Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.

I was here on earth because I chose to be.

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

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

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

I have always been the lover - never the beloved - and I have spent much of my life waiting for trains, planes, boats, footsteps, doorbells, letters, telephones, snow, rain, thunder.

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