I notice no interplay of life and art." Life is that which-pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially-interrupts.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever-permanent ghosts, stamped, imprinted, eternally seen.

Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting-far, far away-what you last met at home.

Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.

Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.

In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.

Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom?

To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.

We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.

Above all, a book is the riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk-a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.