The Barry Goldwater movement excited the depths because the apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the empty promises of an empty liberal center.

Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.

When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.

When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.

In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.

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.

One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.