A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

Here was one place where I could find out who I was and what I was going to become. And that was the public library.

I do not gather things, I prefer to rent them rather than to possess them.

A trait which differentiated New York from European cities was the incredible freedom and ease in which life, including sexual life, could be carried on, on many levels.

The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.

Can the imagination, any more than the boy, be held prisoner ?" - from the foreword to the 1976 edition of "The Painted Bird

Photography was the first foreign language of my artistic expression.