The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.
I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.
Gods don't answer letters.
Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me.
That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.
Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
