A father is a man who fails every day.

He is by nature a vegetarian but would never consider giving up meat.

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives.

Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs.

Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big dark eyeglasses!

In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time.