Just when I most needed important conversation, a sniff of the man-wide world, that is, at least one brainy companion who could translate my friendly language into his tongue of undying carnal love, I was forced to lounge in our neighborhood park, surrounded by children.

I loved the comradeship of the sixties and the seventies, and I still maintain friendships with the people I worked with then - the ones that are still alive. That's one of the great gifts of our political movements, great friendships . . . and also a few enmities.

I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing. ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.

My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.

If you're old and you're healthy and you're active - I don't mean you have to be politically active - if you remain interested in other people and the world, then you live as well as your health will allow.

There isn't a story written that isn't about blood and money. People and their relationship to each other is the blood, the family. And how they live, the money of it.

Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.