Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.

Growth is a greater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth.

A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.

No heart is so hard as the timid heart.

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

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.

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