You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.

In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.

The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, and to the people who read the results of this process, which takes the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.

The first casualty in any war is the truth. In World War II, I was part of a group of people who used to meet once a week with the sole purpose of analyzing the news and trying to work out what we weren't being told. We thought that we were clever, but we had absolutely no idea what was really going on. It was only years later that we learned the true story.