Love is a joint experience between two persons -- but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.

You don't know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.

Love is the main generator of all good writing... Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.

Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.

She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram fall of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.

The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.

I have never gone to a doctor in my adult life, feeling instinctively that doctors meant either cutting or, just as bad, diet.