You can't exist in this world with such strong likes and dislikes.

Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion.

The color of his pallor, however, was a curiously basic white - unmixed, that is, with the greens and yellows of guilt or abject contrition. It was very like the standard bloodlessness in the face of a small boy who loves animals to distraction, all animals, and who has just seen his favourite, bunny-loving sister's expression as she opened the box containing his birthday present to her - a freshly caught young cobra, with a red ribbon tied in an awkward bow around its neck.

An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.

Women kill me. They really do. I don't mean I'm oversexed or anything like that—although I am quite sexy. I just like them, I mean. They're always leaving their goddam bags out in the middle of the aisle.

He was the tallest, thinnest, weariest boy I had ever seen in my life. He was brilliant. He had gorgeous brown eyes, and he had only two suits. He was completely unhappy, and I didn't know why.

If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.