You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.

Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them--at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them.

The book can't compete with the screen. It couldn't compete beginning with the movie screen. It couldn't compete with the television screen and it can't compete with the computer screen I don't think. And now we have all those screens so against all those screens I think the book can't measure up.

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

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.