The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear.

I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.