The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.

The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.

On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.

Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America.

The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.