The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

The most important thing is insight, that is to be - curious - to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.

If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green... If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won't.

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone.

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.