To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.

Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash.

The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.

My ideal job? Landlord of a bordello! The company's good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write.

Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

I decline to accept the end of man.