162 quotes
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
Buchanan Dying : A Play (1974)
But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
On T. S. Eliot (1984)
Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.
On Muriel Spark’s The Only Problem (1984)
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
Couples (1968)
I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is — its irresistible charm — a fire.
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
Introduction to The Best American Short Stories of 1984 (1984)
Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
Couples (1968)
Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
Couples (1968)
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
Couples (1968)
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
Buchanan Dying : A Play (1974)