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.
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...
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 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.
You can go to the dark side of the moon and back and see nothing more wonderful and strange than the way men and women manage to get together.
Yes, well, years. Some die young; some are born old.
That's the genius of the capitalist system: Either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.
She has opened the door of the square cave where the cake of ice sits; and there it is, inches from Harry’s eyes, lopsided from melting but still big, holding within its metal-black bulk the white par...
It frightens him to think of her this way. It makes her seem, in terms of love, so vast.
How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carne...
One of the cool chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.
The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
When I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery. The tears bubble over her lids and the salty taste of pool-water is sealed into her mouth. If you have the guts to be yourself, he says, other p...
The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.
The beast is dry and mottled, shedding skinas minutes drop from life, a wristy pieceof dogged ugliness, its labors meant
Television was soon to eclipse print's inky cloud with its magnetic flare of electrons, pulling millions from their reading chairs to the viewing couch.
Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward.