What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away.

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.

I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkeness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility.

They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now.

Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.

The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it...when the world's filled up, we'll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.