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.

The novelist ... must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all.

Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.

To blame the poor for subsisting on welfare has no justice unless we are also willing to judge every rich member of society by how productive he or she is. Taken individual by individual, it is likely that there's more idleness and abuse of government favors among the economically privileged than among the ranks of the disadvantaged.

There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.

Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.

You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.