I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.

Listen, if you're not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh.

I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.

But you can't always tell - with somebody's mother, I mean. Mothers are all slightly insane.

A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn't stink a little bit of the writer's pride in having given up his pride.

If you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.

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