You don’t know what a trial it is to be —like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.

I think that we already have a really good system in town, but I have a vision that it could be even better. My vision is that academic excellence is the area that we should pursue more, coupled with fiscal discipline.

I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life -- I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved -- in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.

It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you

I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.