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

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

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.

But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.

If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.

I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.