“Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.”

“Without acquainting me with the language or the literature or the oral family histories which my ancestors had loved, they volunteered to make me ignorant and rootless as proof of their patriotism.”

“I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”

“If I am ever put to death on the hook, expect a very human performance.”

“No art is possible without a dance with death.”

“Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.”

“Tremendous concentrations of paper wealth have made it possible for a few persons or institutions to endow certain sorts of human playfulness with inappropriate and hence distressing seriousness. I think not only of the mudpies of art, but of children's games as well-running, jumping, catching, throwing.Or dancing.Or singing songs.”