Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.

Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.

A man is only as good as what he loves.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

Hapiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.

A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.

What is art but a way of seeing?

I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side.

She was what we used to call a suicide blonde - dyed by her own hand.

We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.

Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.