The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So-Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.

The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's family, friends, or lovers - to say nothing of one's children - to live according to the world's definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.

A man's balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.

The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

The moral authority in the Western world is gone. And it is gone forever. It is gone, not because of the criminal record--everybody's record is criminal. It is gone because you cannot do one thing and pretend you're doing another! None of us, who are sitting around in some of the true limbo out-of-space, which we call "now," waiting to be saved, civilized, or discovered, have the moral authority to say anything.