“All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.”

“Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.”

“She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.”

“For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.”

“The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.”

“His life was not confined and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape.”

“I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.”