...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

A young man's ambition - to get along in the world and make a place for himself - half your life goes that way, till you're 45 or 50. Then, if you're lucky, you make terms with life, you get released.