“Writers take words seriously—perhaps the last professional class that does—and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.”

“[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it.”

“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 polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.”

“Neutrinos, they are very small.They have no charge and have no massAnd do not interact at all.The earth is just a silly ballTo them, through which they simply pass,Like dustmaids down a drafty hallOr photons through a sheet of glass.They snub the most exquisite gas,Ignore the most substantial wall,Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,Insult the stallion in his stall,And, scorning barriers of class,Infiltrate you and me. Like tallAnd painless guillotines they fallDown through our heads into the grass.At night, they enter at NepalAnd pierce the lover and his lassFrom underneath the bed—you callIt wonderful; I call it crass.”

“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone”

“The fiction writer is the ombudsman who argues our humble, dubious case in the halls of eternal record.”

“One does not go to Moscow to get fat.”