I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people?

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.

When I read it ["Tough Guys Don't Dance"], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.

We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore; we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.