Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.

There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.

In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.