There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

Years ago, when he was around fourteen, he'd been all hipped on the idea of going to India. He read books about people sitting on rocks, naked, in all kinds of weather, but mostly bad, naturally, and walking barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom. I used to say that it sounded to me as though they were getting away from wisdom as fast as they could. I think he sort of looked down on me for that.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be

I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.

I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.