I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. ‘This above all ...’

There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.

The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

My country is in ruins. So I'm a fish in a poisoned fishbowl. I'm mostly just heartsick about this. There should have been hope. This should have been a great country. But we are despised all over the world now. 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.

A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.

Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author.

People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.