Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture

Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.

You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

California, the department store state.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.