The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas..

For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, aft….

I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bea….

Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind curren….

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own..

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical..

Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form...without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one's form is to….

The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled..

I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashame….

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these d….

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me..

That ... is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang..

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human fai….

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?.

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human faili….

By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affir….

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked..

Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action..

the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me..

To hell with being ashamed of what you liked..

I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to w….