Occupation: Editor Birth: February 27, 1910 Death: September 28, 1993
A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was given an A for adultery; today she would rate no better than a C-plus..
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe..
What we are assigned to bear is in a sense a measure of our stature..
He resented such questions as people do who have thought a great deal about them. The superficial and slipshod have ready answers, but those looking ….
I wondered whether any woman could be happy with a man who says 'folderol'..
I tried to write worse but it was no good; my generalizations came out as before, each more exquisite than the last. I grew discouraged..
Man is vile, I know, but people are wonderful..
The writer can only explore the inner space of his characters by perceptively navigating his own..
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy..
Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked..
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be..
When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones..
Before the mind snaps, or the heart breaks, it gather itself like a clock about to strike. It might even be said one pulls himself together to disint….
Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart..
We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other..
Anyone informed that the universe is expanding and contracting in pulsations of eighty billion years has a right to ask. What's in it for me?.
We turned on one another deep, drowned gazes, and exchanged a kiss that reduced my bones to rubber and my brain to gruel..
Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apolloni….
People rarely do what they don't want to..
Do you believe in astrology? -I don't even believe in astronomy..
"You don't believe in God," I said to Stein. "God is a word banging around in the human nervous system. He exists about as much as Santa Claus." "San….