“Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.”
“The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.”
“I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.”
“To me, the great joy of writing is discovering. Most writers are told to write about what they know, but I still love the adventure of going out and reporting on things I don’t know about.”
“This is the artist, then, life’s hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty’s miser, glory’s slave.”
“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”
“It’s fortunate that I am a writer, because that has helped me understand the properties of words. They are what have made life complex. In the battle for status in the animal kingdom, power and aggressiveness have been all-important. But among humans, once they acquired speech, all that changed.”
“There are some people who have the quality of richness and joy in them and they communicate it to everything they touch. It is first of all a physical quality; then it is a quality of the spirit.”
“I never forget. I never forgive. I can wait. I find it very easy to harbor a grudge. I have scores to settle.”
“People complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that’s the way people think. I don’t think people think in essays; it’s one exclamation point to another.”
“I have never knowingly, I swear to God, written satire. The word connotes exaggeration of the foibles of mankind. To me, mankind just has foibles. You don’t have to push it!”
“There was a time in the 1930s when magazine writers could actually make a good living. ‘The Saturday Evening Post’ and ‘Collier’s’ both had three stories in each issue. These were usually entertaining, and people really went for them. But then television came along, and now of course, information technology… the new way of killing time.”
“My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of ‘Les Miserables,’ in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not – and was not interested in – telling a lie.”
“The modern notion of art is an essentially religious or magical one in which the artist is viewed as a holy beast who in some way, big or small, receives flashes from the godhead, which is known as creativity.”
“Nonfiction is never going to die.”
