Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture."

Laugh and the world laughs with you; snore and you sleep alone.

"Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly.."

"Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through."

Death comes along like a gas bill one can't pay.