Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.

I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.

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.

They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people.

There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.

All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time.

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.