Warren Cox, God knew, was no prize; a commercial person, a sales person, the kind of man who said things like “x numbers of dollars”. At lunch today, laboriously trying to explain some business procedure,...

As a writer, I like the list of “things to strive for” that Richard Yates kept above his typewriter:genuine claritygenuine feelingthe right wordthe exact English sentencethe eloquent detailthe rigorous dramatization of story

The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because...

He found it so easy and so pleasant to cry that he didn’t try to stop for a while, until he realized he was forcing his sobs a little, exaggerating their depth with unnecessary shudders.…The...

Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?

He’s been living on the fringes of art for so many years, talking and talking about it, that he’s come to expect all the prerogatives of being an artist without ever doing the work. I...

He couldn’t even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.

Never say anything that doesn’t improve on silence.

You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don’t like. Great. This is the...

Don’t worry, I can’t be bothered! You’re not worth the trouble it would take to hit you! You’re not worth the powder it would take to blow you up. You are an empty, empty, hollow...

Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might...

if you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want

If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.

If you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes backbone to lead the life you want.

Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn’t much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.

if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.

You see? I don’t know what ‘mature’ means, either, and you could talk all night and I still wouldn’t know. It’s all just words to me, Frank. I watch you talking and I think: Isn’t...

Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.

How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their grey-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through...

I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in the sixth grade; people who...