This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.

I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth.

I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes.

Americans still believe they are cut out to be successful-in everything: love, love-making, luck, luck-giving, money-making, sense-making, cancer-avoiding, clothes-wearing, car-driving, and so on.

Sometimes the most intelligent thing is not to do anything, certainly nothing loaded with the imbecility of emotionality.

I used to throw things out, saying, 'This isn't great.' It didn't occur to me that it didn't have to be great.

I always know a lie when I hear it, and the effect it has on me is no good at all. I go berserk just forcing myself not to go berserk, just trying to see truth in the lie, to see it in full context, and in a dimension in which it has got to be more than just a lie, possibly the profoundest kind of truth.