My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature, I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish.

Contrary to what many of you may imagine, a career in letters is not without its drawbacks - chief among them the unpleasant fact that one is frequently called upon to sit down and write.

I walk a lot in New York, not for the exercise but to get from place to place, and because it's the way of having the least contact with human beings.

Marriage entitles women to the protection of a strong man who will steady the stepladder while they paint the kitchen ceiling.

Television turned out to be exactly as bad as the most irritating and pedantic intellectuals of the '50s said it was going to be.

Take away a man's actual sense of manhood - which is conventionally based on the ability to work, to earn money, to be self-sufficient, to provide for children - and you've got to give them something else. And they did.

What people don't know is: Clothes don't really fit you unless they're made for you. Especially when you wear men's clothes, like I do. American women think that clothes fit them if they can fit into them. But that's not at all what fit means.