If I miss anything, it's being able to hang out in the city of New York meeting people and talking to them on the corner.

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.

When you think of things that influenced your life, Mother Goose influenced more people than almost any other thing, the rhythms of those poems. Everything after that was a bare imitation of some of those mysterious and materialistic poems.

I'm really sorry for people growing up right now, because they have some cockeyed idea that they can get by with their eyes closed; the cane they're tapping is money, and that won't take them in the right direction.

I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.

To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.

Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.