I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently.

The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.

Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.

If the word 'integration' means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.

Love is like the lightning, and your maturity is signaled by the extent to which you can accept the dangers and the power and the beauty of love.

She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn't a singer; that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice.

Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.