War is utter damn nonsense, a vast cancer fed by lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don't do the fighting.

If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves

I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps.

The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach the white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.

The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm's length.

The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there's nowhere else. It's the top of the world.