The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.

...never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile.

To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.

America has an almost obscene infatuation with itself. Has there ever been a big, powerful country that is as patriotic as America? And patriotic in the tinniest way, with so much flag waving? You'd really think we were some poor little republic, and that if one person lost his religion for one hour, the whole thing would crumble. America is the real religion in this country.

Amateurs... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.

Television is coitus interruptus brought into aesthetics.

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