The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

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

Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.

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

What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.

There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.

Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that it ceases to be fiction.

A lonely man is a lonesome thing a stone a bone a stick a receptacle for Gilbeys gin a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.

For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.

Autobiography is now as common as adultery and hardly less reprehensible.

I do not believe we can blame genetics for adultery, homosexuality, dishonesty and other character flaws.

French novels generally treat of the relations of women to the world and to lovers, after marriage; consequently there is a great deal in French novels about adultery, about improper relations between the sexes, about many things which the English public would not allow.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

That goes against what I believe morally. That's adultery, and if I'm accused of that, no, that's not right. I have two kids who see that and remember that and judge me. It didn't happen, and it's not to be reported that way.

Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.

As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.

Passion is the evil in adultery. If a man has no opportunity of living with another man's wife, but if it is obvious for some reason that he would like to do so, and would do so if he could, he is no less guilty than if he was caught in the act.

I've looked on many women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. God knows I will do this and forgives me.

God's forgiveness is the only thing. And, well, I take full responsibility for the adultery. It was my fault and, you know, no matter what went on, the man has to take responsibility; and I do.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

I have certain moral parameters that I do not cross in writing; I don't write about adultery or kids having premarital sex.

Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.

All the commandments: You shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and so on, are summed up in this single command: You must love your neighbor as yourself.

Adultery - which is the only grounds for divorce in New York - is not grounds for divorce in California. As a matter of fact, adultery in Southern California is grounds for marriage.

Mars, when guilty of homicide, and set free from the charge of murder by the Athenians through favour, lest he should appear to be too fierce and savage, committed adultery with Venus.

I didn't run off with the secretary. It made it seem like I had committed adultery and then ran off with a secretary, neither of which happened.

We made one film called Thy Neighbor's Wife in which I got flogged at the public whipping post for adultery. I did my best acting in that film, I guess.

But, you know, there's still an argument, there's still ten states that outlaw premarital sex, and many more states where adultery is still outlawed and a crime.

No adultery is bloodless.

Heroes and heroines don't commit adultery.

I don't appreciate a preacher who commits adultery and then goes out and blames me.

There exists no culture in which adultery is unknown, no cultural device or code that extinguishes philandering.