"Those that are hunted Know this as their life, Their reward: to walk Under such trees in full knowledge Of what is in glory above them, And to feel no fear."

"Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual sense of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtle than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery."

"All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours."

"What he had done, how he had chosen to spend his energies, really was science. A way of looking, reverencing. And the purpose of all science, like living, which amounts to the same thing, was not the accumulations of Gnostic power, fixing of formulas for the names of God, stockpiling brutal efficiency, accomplishing the sadistic myth of progress. the purpose of science was to revive and cultivate a perpetual state of wonder. For nothing deserved wonder so much as our capacity to feel it."

"What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power."

"When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places. That’s the way I remember them, heading for an exit."

"I sometimes go back to walk through the ghostly remains of Sutton Place where the rude, new buildings stand squarely in one another’s river views."

"I love Cheever's mellifluous sentence-making or his kind of snatching images out of the blue, out of nowhere, and his charmingly eccentric, just-right endings."

"I'm not like some writers who are very specific about their audience. Cheever talks about looking into the woods and he sees somebody walking there and he's writing for that person. My sense of an audience is very wide-maybe people in the distant future-in a sense, the universe."

"I'm very fond of Cheever."

"His religious requirements—that the service come from Cranmer’s rites in the old prayer book, that it take 33 minutes or less, that the church be within 10 minutes’ driving distance and that the altar be sufficiently simple so that it wouldn’t remind him of a gift shop—limited his choice of parishes."

"A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind."

"At my back I hear the word—”homosexual”—and it seems to split my world in two.... It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world."

"People named John and Mary never divorce. For better or for worse, in madness and in saneness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep, and commit mayhem, but they are not free to divorce. Tom, Dick, and Harry can go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary."

"The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, nearsightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another."

"The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony."

"One would never have guessed that the world had such a capacity for genuine grief. The most we can do is exploit our memories of his excellence."

"We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual."

"Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil not the strength to choose between the two."

"I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind."

"Strange and predatory and truly dangerous, car thieves and muggers—they seem to jeopardize all our cherished concepts, even our self-esteem, our property rights, our powers of love, our laws and pleasures. The only relationship we seem to have with them is scorn or bewilderment, but they belong somewhere on the dark prairies of a country that is in the throes of self-discovery."

"When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand."

"I'm wicked, as you say, and I'm rude and I'm boorish and I discovered, after marrying Mr Scaddon, that I could be all these things and worse and that there would still be plenty of people to lick my boots."

"Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord."

"..for the dead fish was striped like a cat and the sky was striped like the fish and the conch was whorled like an ear and the beach was ribbed like a dog's mouth and the movables in the surf splintered and crashed like the walls of Jericho."

"...your underwear is clean in case you should be hit by a taxicab and have to be undressed by strangers."

"He had that spooky bass voice meant to announce that he had entered the kingdom of manhood, but Rosalie knew that he was still outside the gates."

"My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am as bald as an egg. However I still get around and am mean to cats."

"All literary men are Red Sox fans—to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life."

"Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world."

"For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle. [It] has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty."

"A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies."

"The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness."

"I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone."

"Art is the triumph over chaos."

"Homesickness is nothing … Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time."

"He was a tall man with an astonishing and somehow elegant curvature of the spine, formed by an enlarged lower abdomen, which he carried in a stately and contented way, as if it contained money and securities."

"The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man’s complexity and the strength and decency of his longings. Where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world."

"Donald Trump dresses his hatred up as though it were a peacock's feathers. In any polity entitled to think itself civilized, persons with regard for their breeding would leave the room politely but definitely whenever Donald Trump entered it."

"In baseball, the true class enemy is not the boss, but the fan."

"If you talk to gangsters long enough, you’ll find out they’re just as bad as respectable people."

"Great care has gone into the construction of the shadow which declares itself to be Richard Nixon."

"The faces in New York remind me of people who had played a game and lost."

"One does not attend this movie; one enlists in it."

"For touching a people who want to forget ugly problems, no politician equals the one who has already forgotten them himself."

"Ginsberg used to stay in the publishing house. Our editorial office had two rooms and a kitchen; it was a tiny place. And one of the rooms was kind of a guest room so that visiting authors could stay there. Allen would come sometimes for a week at a time or more. And he hung out in the store, also. The store had become quite a center for writers by that time. Ginsberg was working on "The Fall of America," which was his long chronicle of the Vietnam War, which is full of the anguish and passion and anger that so many people felt. The war had been going on for such a long time by then. That book won the National Book Award [in 1974]."

"The tempest unleashes an alphabet letters fall through the apertures of crazy angles to spell out the future uprooting the course of invention and enslaving the masters"

"When I joined City Lights in 1971 and started working with Lawrence, it was clear that it had been very much a center of protest, for people with revolutionary ideas and people who wanted to change society. And when I first began working at the little editorial office up on Filbert and Grant, people that Lawrence had known through the whole decade of the '60s were dropping in all the time, like Paul Krassner, Tim Leary, people who were working with underground presses and trying to provide an alternative to mainstream media. This was a period of persecution, and FBI infiltration of those presses."

"Maybe a thousand dollars"

"The old San Francisco is under attack to the point where it's disappearing"