“Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”

“Where's your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!”

“Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline!”

“How must it have felt, Pikes, the night they seized your films, like entrails yanked from the camera, out of your guts, clutching them in coils and wads to stuff them up a stove to burn away! Did it feel as bad as having some fifty thousand books annihilated with no recompense? Yes. Yes. Stendahl felt his hands grow cold with the senseless anger.”

“To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes.”

“I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously."[Writer’s Digest Interview (Robert Jacobs, Writer’s Digest, February 1976)]”

“And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before.”