I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on them or they didn't.

I'm beginning to feel that no author has the right to tear his characters apart if he doesn't know how, or feel that he knows how (poor sucker) to put them together again. I'm tired—my God, so tired—of leaving them all broken on the page with just 'The End' written underneath.

In my mind, I'm probably the biggest sex maniac you ever saw.

I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone—a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness.

Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was, in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces, a stunning and final girl.

I used to think she was quite intelligent , in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about all those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not.

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.