Faint equivalents can sometimes be found ... . Or it can be rendered obliquely-an adolescent's mental image of his or her parents making love, which must be something on the order of crocodiles mating.

My mother studied English and drama at the University of Pennsylvania, where my father studied architecture. She was a great influence in all sorts of ways, a wicked wit.

And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.

Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. Theyve been a laboratory for everybody.

There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.

Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.

I believe that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love.