"One of the most extraordinary things about industrial society of the present day is its idiot lack of memory. Tabloid…"

"The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read …"

"The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He w…"

"Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of."

"The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the sn…"

"In the last twenty-five years a change has come over the visual habits of Americans . . . From being a wordminded peo…"

"A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he h…"

"There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You star…"

"Great works of the imagination are not produced quickly nor do they take quick effect on the popular mind."

"Humanity has a strange fondness for following processions. Get four men following a banner down the street, and, if t…"