I know it's become fashionable to depict the police as sadistic Cossacks riding down innocent citizens, but I've become well enough acquainted with law-enforcement agencies across the country to know...
Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was...
Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very...
She wanted to know what American writers I liked. Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson… No, living. Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary au...
I only object when any one particular group...gets a stranglehold on American criticism and squeezes out anybody who doesn't conform to its own standards....The ax falls, ecumenically, on the head of...
Fitzgerald has charm. It's a silly word, but it's an exact word for me. I like 'The Great Gatsby' and it's sad, gay nostalgia.
What are your chief vices? And virtues? I have no vices. The concept doesn't exist in my vocabulary. My chief virtue is gratitude
The trouble with all these far-right and far-left mentalities is that they can encompass only one side of an argument and are congenitally incapable of holding two opinions in their heads at the same...
That isn't writing at all, it's typing.
Flannery O'Connor had a certain genius. I don't think John Updike has, or Norman Mailer or William Styron, all of whom are talented, but they don't exceed themselves in any way. Norman Mailer thinks W...
I think the argument that no whites are free of racism is quite erroneous. But then, on another level, does it really matter if anybody is free of any negative feeling about anything? No matter how mu...
Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.
There's something really the matter with most people who wear tattoos. There's at least some terrible story. I know from experience that there's always something terribly flawed about people who are t...
Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.
The most dangerous thing in the world is to make a friend of an Englishman because he'll come sleep in your closet rather than spend 10 shillings on a hotel.
I have an extremely strong, masculine mind and a feminine sensibility level, which is kind of an unusual combination. Both men and women tell me things and I can relate on two levels simultaneously.
Any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their a...
Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.
Strange where our passions carry us, floggingly pursue us, forcing upon us unwanted dreams, unwelcome destinies.
Royal summoned mourners. They came from the village, from the neighboring hills and, wailing like dogs at midnight, laid siege to the house. Old women beat their heads against the walls, moaning men p...
