There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!

We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it — the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.

We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.

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

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

Once you had read the Sigmund Freud|Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology.

I never yet touched a fig leaf that didn't turn into a price tag.

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.