The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.

A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.

The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.