A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts.

Eh Bien you like this sacred pig of a country?" asked Marco. "Why not? I like it anywhere. It's all the same, in France you are paid badly and live well; here you are paid well and live badly.

Display advertising and the movies, though they may dull the wits, certainly stimulate the eyes.

What's the use, there never was a woman living who could understand political ideas.

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 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

Love is cheap. You can buy it anywhere. Lives are cheap. It's money that's dear. You have to work days and sit up nights thinking how to make money.