As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.

The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life.

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

The spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern...American business is steadily coming back to a normal level of prosperity.

I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.

There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond this there is great unrest.

Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.