History has become more important than ever because of the to unprecedented ability of the historical sciences to take in man's life on earth as a wh….

Walking I am unbound, and find that precious unity of life and imagination, that silent outgoing self, which is so easy to loose, but which a high mo….

I had to admit that in his old-fashioned way O'Hara was still romantic about sex; like Scott Fitzgerald, he thought of it as an upper-class prerogati….

We never know how much has been missing from our lives until a true writer comes along..

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, ….

A year after Hemingway died on the front page, Faulkner went off after a binge, as if dying was nobody's business but his own..

Altogether beautiful in the power of its feeling. As beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway..

To have a sense of history one must consider oneself a piece of history..

Is it strange, then, that in a literature so concerned with realism and with personal liberation this refusal and impoverishment of the life of the s….

If we practiced medicine like we practice education, wed look for the liver on the right side and left side in alternate years..

What need had the businessman to scribble or philosophize when he dominated the imagination of his time and the frantic materialism that was his prin….

When a writer talks about his work, he's talking about a love affair..

Art changes all the time, but it never "improves." It may go down, or up, but it never improves as technology and medicine improve..

Only power can get people into a position where they may be noble..

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time, in others' minds..

The conviction of tragedy that rises out of his [John Dos Passos's] work is the steady protest of a sensitive democratic conscience against the tyran….

Modern American literature was born in protest, born in rebellion, born out of the sense of loss and indirection which was imposed upon the new gener….

What happens whenever we convert a writer into a symbol is that we lose the writer himself in all his indefeasible singularity, his particular inimit….

I liked reading and working out my ideas in the midst of that endless crowd walking in and out of the (library) looking for something. I, too, was se….

Brooklyn Heights itself is a window on the port. Here, where the perspective is fixed by the towers of Manhattan and the hills of New Jersey and Stat….

A classic is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive..