A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.

I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.

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.

Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.

You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.

Don't you see, if when we die there's nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It's just an ocean of horror.

Those running tights the young women wear now, so they look like spacewomen, raspberry red and electric green so tight they show every muscle right into the crack between the buttocks, what is the point of them? Display. Young animals need to display.