There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.

When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun.

The more you reason the less you create.

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.

The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.

What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?