People should practice an art in order to make their souls grow and not to make money or become famous. Paint a picture. Write.
A man without a home can’t be lost.
If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.
Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.
Each one of us has to be what he or she is.
God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.
There’s a Chaplain who never visited the front.
What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It’s a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.
Thinking doesn’t seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe.
The triumph of anything is a matter of organization.
We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one.
The secret to success in any human endeavor is total concentration.
Maybe they invited me because they know I have a tuxedo.
Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people’s actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be.
George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography.
Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.
Everything of mine which has been filmed so far has been one character short, and that character is me.
Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity. Either you have a rewarding time, or you don’t. You don’t have to say why afterward. You don’t have to say anything.
A lot of critics think I’m stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.
I couldn’t survive my own pessimism if I didn’t have some kind of sunny little dream.