There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.

One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness - the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.

The true religion of America has always been America.

You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.