“Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach”

“Journalism is "a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures.”

“There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.”

“I couldn't imagine, and I don't say this with any pride, but I really couldn't imagine writing without a desperate deadline.”

“Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.”

“I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.”

“... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bullyher, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.”

“Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?”