Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.

...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.

The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions.

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.

Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

It's not up to me ... to make the world consistent.