The essence of spirit ... was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be."... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.

You're gambling with something vital. Most writers get smashed egos.

The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.

I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.