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.

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

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

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.

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

What is art but a way of seeing?

California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.

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

In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.

Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

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.

When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.

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

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.

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

People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

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.

Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it - they should, because they put it all in beforehand.

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

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

Conquered people tend to be witty.

There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever... money, for instance, or war.

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

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

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

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

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

I'm glad I haven't lived in vain.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

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

Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language

Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.

A man should be able to hear and to bear the worst that could be said of him.

Boredom is the conviction that you cant change. The shriek of unused capacities.

Boredom is the conviction that you cant changethe shriek of unused capacities.

The secret motive of the absent minded is to be innocent while guilty. Absent mindedness is spurious innocence.

Humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul.

Art has to do with the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

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

A plan relieves you of the torment of choice.

A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him.

I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.

Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it. They should, because they put it all in beforehand. It's like an Easter Egg hunt.

Unless you made your life a turning point, there was no reason for existing.