Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth-whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.
I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.
I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man’s complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.
Never eat a heavily sugared doughnut before you go on TV.
Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.
Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
That’s the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.
The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination he inflates his capacity for evil.
How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?
Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly lighted, a passage for the gentle transports and miseries of the poor.
The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, near-sightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.
What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.
Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
The fear of death is for all of us everywhere, but for the great intelligence of the opium eater it is beautifully narrowed into the crux of drugs.
The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.