“One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war.”

“One minute decides the outcome of a battle, one hour the success of a campaign, one day the fate of empires.”

“Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.”

“"Who among us doesn't like NASCAR?" What Kerry actually said at a campaign rally in Milwaukee was: "There isn't one of us here who doesn't like NASCAR and who isn't a fan."”

“I don't know if Native Son is a good book or a bad book. And I don't know if the book I'm working on now will be a good book or a bad book. And I really don't care. The mere writing of it will be more fun and a deeper satisfaction than any praise or blame from anybody. I feel that I'm lucky to be alive to write novels today, when the whole world is caught in the pangs of war and change.”

“A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.”

“It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.”

“Bad books engender bad habits, but bad habits engender good books.”

“Technical criticism in particular is the despair of the artist. No one but an idiot would offer a poet his comments in terms of spondees and trochees; why must the painter daily suffer the indignity? Any picture which makes one conscious first of its technical qualities, good or bad, is not a good picture, whatever else it may be.”

“Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse”