Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.

Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a 'work' of man.

The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world.

The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof

Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity.

All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic; an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered - no laughter, no tears, no purgation.

On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act.