New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.

Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.

Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.