Accent the ugly until it becomes gorgeous.

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

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

In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.

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.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.