A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

I belong rather to a more classical tradition of social analysis.

My ignorance is not charming.

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.

The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.

Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when the see the real thing. For photographic images tend to subtract feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life. Often something disturbs us more in photographed form than it does when we actually experience it.

The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.