There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

I'm not against TV; I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.

…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?