“I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.”

“I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patrotism.”

“I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess - and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society.”

“In fact, I suspect that our only hope is disaster. Cruel tho' it is to say it, there has got to be a vast die-off in the human population -- likely including us and our families -- before the survivors find themselves in a world where a new and humble and 'religious' adaptation with nature is possible.Disaster is not necessary; the better world could be achieved through reason and common sense and a sense of fellowship -- but most of the present human world is dead set against us. Thus I was forced to the disagreeable resolutions (not solutions) which I attempted to sketch out in the novel 'Good News.' The title is of course deliberately ambiguous.”

“If you hope for any sort of dialogue and unity with all factions on the vaguely leftist or radical side of politics, you must cease from silly verbal abuse. If you don't want it, then we go on as we are, fractious and impotent.”

“There's another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets it tends to separate a man from the world around him. If I switch it on my eyes adapt to it and I can see only the small pool of light it makes in front of me; I am isolated. Leaving the flashlight in my pocket where it belongs, I remain a part of the environment I walk through and my vision though limited has no sharp or definite boundary.”

“The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And one more demand: I expect the novelist to aspire to improve the world. ... As a novelist, I want to be more than one more dog barking at the other dogs barking at me. Not out of any foolish hope that one novelist, or all virtuous novelists in chorus, can make much of a difference for good, except in the long run, but out of the need to prevent the human world from relaxing into something worse. To maintain the tension between truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness, good and evil. ... I believe the highest duty of the serious novelist is, whatever the means or technique, to be a critic of his society, to hold society to its own ideals, or if these ideals are unworthy, to suggest better ideals.”