The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The review, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.

Women are an alien race set down among us.

So, you know, I think any life has in it enough material, enough points of departure, to fuel a writer's career and that we shouldn't worry about what we're not but to try to focus on what we are and what we do know.

Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.