Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen.

It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.

Love is something that hangs up behind the bathroom door and smells of Lysol.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

Let’s not talk about how I am. It’s a subject I know too much about to want to think about anymore.

I would take anything I love and throw it off the highest cliff you ever saw and not wait to hear it bounce.