School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

So, you know, I think any life has in it enough material, enough points of departure, to fuel a writer's career and that we shouldn't worry about what we're not but to try to focus on what we are and what we do know.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

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 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.

In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.