If you can change style, why stick to one style? Style is a vanity because it gives you product identification.

You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that's the highest effectiveness man has achieved.

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.

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.

We didn't win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out.

There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.

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