Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.

The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.

Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.