It's the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all.

The hopes and fears of all our years are here with us tonight.

Poverty is a relatively mild disease for even a very flimsy American soul, but uselessness will kill strong and weak souls alike, and kill every time.

I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That's why I served in World War II, and that's why I wrote books.

Terry Kitchen asked me one time why, since I had so few gifts as a husband and father, I had gotten married. And I heard myself say: "That's the way the post-war movie goes.

You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.

Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.