Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.

Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.

You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.

The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.

World War III will be triggered off not by suppressed nationalists seeking political independence, as happened the first time around when the Serbs at Sarajevo shot the heir to the Austrian throne, but by some semiliterate, whacked-out "loner" who lobs a rocket into a nuclear arsenal in order to impress Brooke Shields.

How can one say, 'No, this isn't a part of life,' since it always is? The contaminant of sex, the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are.