A winded, defeated-looking fat woman in filthy coveralls trudged beside us, hearing what Miss Pefko said. She turned to examine Dr. Breed, looking at him with helpless reproach. She hated people who thought too much....

The museums in children’s minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror—to protect the children from eternal grief.For my own part, though: It would have been catastrophe if I had forgotten my...

She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrased and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going,...

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

He gave me the key, which I later discovered would open practically every door in the hotel. I thanked him, and I made a small mistake we irony collectors often make: I tried to share...

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other...

and I’m whistling as beautifully as I can.

I suggest that you work for a socialist form of government. Free Enterprise is much too hard on the old and the sick and the shy and the poor and the stupid, and on the...

Americans… are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.

Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting...

Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such...

What is my definition of jazz? ‘Safe sex of the highest order.

He had had no experience in asking for a job with a big organization, and Mr. Dilling was making him aware of what a fine art it was–if you couldn’t run a machine. A duel...

We’re really awful animals. I mean, that dumb Barbra Streisand song, ‘People who need people are the luckiest people in the world’ – she’s talking about cannibals. Lot’s to eat.

Whenever my children complain about the planet to me, I say ‘Shut up, I just got here myself’.

How to Write with Style”. Essay, 1985)

It’s a small world.” . . . “When you put it in a cemetery it is.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices. And then, while he ate them, she would talk...

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

I told him that if we doubted that we are demons in Hell, he should read The Mysterious Stranger, which Mark Twain wrote in 1898, long before the First World War (1914-1918). In the title...

No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s . . .””And?””No damn...

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of...

All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let’s get back...

And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: “Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with...

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not...

The row was actually about everything in creation, but it had for its subject of the moment the boy’s mustache.

Jonah-John-if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still-not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places, at certain times,...

Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy, but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater,...

That’s what is was to be young — to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do.

I identified a basic mistake my parents had made about life: They thought that it would be very wrong if anybody ever laughed at them.

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule...

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism; Iraq in cynical money-making. And there’s no optimism or idealism now — Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We’re proud of...

not to believe my government.

What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It’s a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you...

You’ll forget it when you’re dead, and so will I. When I’m dead, I’m going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.

If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a...

The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.

There was no question about it- the girl in the photograph was staggeringly beautiful. She was Miss Canal Zone, a runner-up in the Miss Universe Contest — and in fact far more beautiful than the...

To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went...

The mind reels.

The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman.

…Jesus was only twelve years old. Jesus was learning the carpentry trade from his father.Two Roman soldiers came into the shop with a mechanical drawing on papyrus of a device they wanted built by sunrise...

Five German soldiers and a police dog on a leash were looking down into the bed of the creek. The soldiers’ blue eyes were filled with a bleary civilian curiosity as to why one American...

Things stayed peaceful in there, even as the crashing vehicles and the cries of the injured and dying reached a crescendo outside. “I fry mine in butter!” indeed.

We are all what we pretend to be, but, we had better be very careful what we pretend.

THE WINNERS ARE AT WAR WITH THE LOSERS, AND THE FIX IS ON. THE PROSPECTS FOR PEACE ARE AWFUL.