In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure lik...
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an ath...
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
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.
You are still you. The U.S. is still the U.S., held together by credit cards and Indian names
Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.
TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no ski...
Nevertheless, we react to one a bit differently than we do to Rothko’s hovering panels or Barnett Newman’s stripes, though Whistler does approach their extremity of abstraction; part of our pleasure l...
I think taste is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way pol...
How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
Heade’s calm is unsteady, storm-stirred; we respond in our era to its hint of the nervous and the fearful. His weather is interior weather, in a sense, and he perhaps was, if far from the first to por...
Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath.
Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
But the nightmares were accurate enough: we are like a swarm of mosquitoes, crazy with thirst and doomed to be swatted.
I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded ou...
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness will be followed by another - that a coherent matrix has been pre...
That's the genius of the capitalist system: Either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.