Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.

Love is fragile -- she was thinking -- but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love-words, the tenderness learned, and treasured up for the next lover.

Before you criticize others, remember, they may not have had the same opportunities in life as you have had

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.

Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.

Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that registered earthquakes ten thousand miles away.