We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.

So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.

I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat.

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

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.