The two real problems in life are boredom and death.

Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.

Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?

I'm glad I haven't lived in vain.

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

The more realistic you are the more you threaten the grounds of your own art.

...America didn't have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way ... We weren't starving, we weren't bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.