Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus...or off the bus.

The first newspaper I worked on was the 'Springfield Union' in Springfield, Massachusetts. I wrote over a hundred letters to newspapers asking for work and got three responses, two no's.

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

Nonfiction is never going to die.

By the time I received my doctorate in American studies in 1957, I was in the twisted grip of a disease of our times in which the sufferer experiences an overwhelming urge to join the 'real world.' So I started working for newspapers.

I've never met an American who wanted to build an empire.

Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus...or off the bus.