We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.

People were standing up everywhere shouting, "This is me! This is me!" Every time you looked at them they stood up and told you who they were, and the truth of it was that they had no more idea who or what they were than he had. They believed their flashing signs, too. They ought to be standing up and shouting, "This isn't me! This isn't me!" They would if they had any decency. "This isn't me!" Then you might know how to proceed through the flashing bullshit of this world.

A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!

You go to someone and you think, 'I'll tell him this.' But why? The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that's why you feel awful later--you've relieved yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it's not better, it's worse---the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse.

I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.

One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on.

When I was a child... I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'