Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil – not the strength to choose between the two.
The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.
For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.
All literary men are Red Sox fans – to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
I sometimes go back to walk through the ghostly remains of Sutton Place where the rude, new buildings stand squarely in one another’s river views.
There isn’t a king or a merchant prince in the whole world that I envy, for I always knew I was born to be a child of destiny and that I was never meant to wring my living from detestable, low, degrading, mean and ordinary kinds of business.
For these are not as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are temporary encampment and outposts of the civilization that we – you and I – shall build.
Now working is terribly painful and I’m still having a fight with the booze. I’ve enlisted the help of a doctor but it’s touch and go. A day for me; a day for the hootch.
Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman.
Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can’t write a story.
The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.
Admite the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.
People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.
I don’t like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.
These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.
The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost man. One would not want as a reader a man who did not appreciate the finesse of a double play.
She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.
To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
I was here on earth because I chose to be.