I was going to get myself recognized at any price. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.

The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk after dinner.

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that - how to express this - you really must make the self.

For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.

The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.

The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is forbidden to all comic creations and to what is comic in you and me.

The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.