When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.

Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.

America is a younger country than England, obviously, and as self-awareness is forming in America - are we a collection of immigrants, are we a load of Italians and Germans and Jews and Brits and Irish, or are we a country with a soul and an identity? - there was a subliminal sense, they knew that the writers would be the ones who would answer those questions.

When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.

America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short.

When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.