The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.

Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

One great flaw in the reforming passion is that in its eagerness to remedy social wrongs it tends to neglect, certainly to undervalue, the experience of those whose lives it wishes to improve.

Taste speaks through a turn of phrase, a curl of the lip, a shrug of the shoulder: it makes an atmosphere.

Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.

Good readers make much out of little.

The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice.

No one has ever seen the self. It has no visible shape, nor does it occupy measurable space. It is an abstraction, like other abstractions equally elusive: the individual, the mind, the society

He claimed his modest share of the general foolishness of the human race.

If you have nothing, don’t worry. You still have a smile and love to win the world.

He kissed my palm, lingering his lips on my skin. Then he inhaled. "Mmmm, " he moaned. " Like gin to an alcoholic. Sweet as fresh molasses and deadly as snake venom.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.

It's important for me to fight for principles. But I am not willing to cope with the nastiness of politics anymore and the endless destructive confrontations that it leads to.

It's so damn hard to write a great historical mystery based on fact. It's not for lack of trying.

Dignity belongs to the conquered.

Anyone whose needs are small seems threatening to the rich, because he's always ready to escape their control.

The development of space technology, including space warfare today, is similar in its technological-industrial significance to the development of navies a hundred years ago.

All plot comes from the character's trying to get something, to achieve something, wanting, desiring, longing.

Children like being a little scared, but they don't want to be disturbed.