This grossly advertised wonder [Venice], this gold idol with clay feet, this trompe-l'oeil, this painted deception, this cliche-what intelligent iconoclast could fail to experience a destructive impulse in her presence?

Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.

... it was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words ofthe Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint's picture.

A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.

Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.

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