Courage to me means ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life-not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things...My courage is faith-faith in the eternal resilience of me-that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does, I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide

The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.

good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handle with gloves.

Shakespeare--whetting, frustrating, surprising and gratifying.

You are mysterious, I love you. You’re beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that’s the rarest known combination.

A writer wastes nothing.