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.

Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.

There are these two kinds of patriotism. There's blind patriotism, unflagging patriotism. And then there's the patriotism that says I live in a democracy and it's very important for the health and the life of this democracy that it get better all the time, not get worse.

Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.