All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.

All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.

Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.

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.

The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.