If someone tells you he is going to make "a realistic decision," you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.

You must force sex to do the work of love and love to do the work of sex.

In any work that is truly creative, I believe, the writer cannot be omniscient in advance about the effects that he proposes to produce. The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past.

The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world.

An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.