I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

• Dreams come true without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
• A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
• Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
• Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
• The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
• Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
• The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.
• Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
• Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
• Truth should not be forced it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.