Write about the things that attract you. Choose your subjects the way you used to choose your toys: out of desire.

After the navy, I transferred to Harvard and finished there. I was there the spring term of 1951 and I stayed through the summer term and a whole other year, so I was able to do two years in a little less than a year and a half.

I think situations are more important than plot and character.

I left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952.

My idea was to go to Vienna to study conducting and perhaps play in an orchestra first, so I thought before I got to Vienna I could do with a little training in Paris.

You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.

I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches.