And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.

Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.

That ... is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.

Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.