If I were God, I certainly wouldn't want people to love me sentimentally. It's too unreliable.

That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any.

I could happily lie down and die sometimes.

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.

It's no fun to be yellow. Maybe I'm not all yellow. I don't know. I think maybe I'm just partly yellow and partly the type that doesn't give much of a damn if they lose their gloves. One of my troubles is, I never care too much when I lose something - it used to drive mother crazy when I was a kid. Some guys spend days looking for something they've lost. I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I'd care too much. Maybe that's why I'm partly yellow. It's no excuse, though. It really isn't. What you should be is not yellow at all.

Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.)

Then again you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.'