The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.

I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.

The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.

Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.