I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.

Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.

You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.

One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.

Every moment of one’s existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.

Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart

There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.

Every one of my books had killed me a little more.

The natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety.

The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

I guess all that's left is to love the fire.

Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon

The paradox is that no love can prove so intense as the love of two narcissists for each other.

Great sex is apocalyptic. There is no such thing as great sex unless you have an apocalyptic moment.

Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way. p.207

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.

You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.

Existentialism is the kind of philosophy that makes for legendary children.

No heart is so hard as the timid heart.

Yeah, fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.

The more things you own, the more things you need to keep you comfortable.

I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind

When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.

Love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away

The jeep would round the bend, be hit by a dozen bullets at once, and that would be the end of his petty history of unfocused groping and unimportant dissatisfactions.

That was how the tears went down Cherry's face...a teaspoon full of ten years' sorrow.

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.

There are many churches in my name and in the name of my apostles. The greatest and holiest is named after Peter; it is a place of great splendor in Rome. Nowhere can be found more gold.

I wonder, said the Lord I wonder if I know the answer any more.

...and dread came back like a hoot from a bully on the street outside.

Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.

I cannot bear that chirpy Bobby Kennedy, always building his beaver's nest with a few more facts. He needs to look into the abyss.

The moments like these, the passing doubts, were the temptations that caught you if you were not careful.

Every time I move I squash something said Loathesome.

It is easy to comprehend people who are weaker than ourselves, but it is not as simple to be ready for the true feelings of those more powerful.

So long as you use a knife, there's some love left.

Men who work at Time have a life expectancy which is not long said the young man from Newsweek

In the South of Spain, one could look to vice as quickly as to virtue for a sense of tradition.