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

I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.

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

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences.

Mostly I just kill time," he said, "and it dies hard.