If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the...

A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.

We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.

see without looking, . . . hear without listening, . . . breathe without asking.

The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks,...

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a...

The Americans are violently oral. That’s why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all — isn’t respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be...

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one’s nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.

Of course, behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.

You owe it to us all to get on with what you’re good at.

What people don’t realize is that intimacy has its conventions as well as ordinary social intercourse. There are three cardinal rules — don’t take somebody else’s boyfriend unless you’ve been specifically invited to do so,...

As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.

Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.

Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefers to dwell on what is absent, on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual...

My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.

No hero is immortal till he dies.

May it not be that, just as we have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that faith...

”Healing,” Papa would tell me, ”is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.”

It is… axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the...

The only way to spend New Year’s Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.

The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must...

No hero is mortal till he dies.

Art is born of humiliation.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

No good opera plot can be sensible:… people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

You have to see the sex act comically, as a child.

To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next...

There’s only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, ”Did you get an erection?” If the answer is ”Yes” from a majority of the twelve,...

One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.

Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.

Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.

America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an Tlite which knows the law in some field or other,...

”God is Love,” we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at...

When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country because such affections come naturally to us and are good in themselves, although we may corrupt them. We are...