The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.

No heart is so hard as the timid heart.

Every one of my books had killed me a little more.

There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.

Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.