My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me [at age five] by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.

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.

Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.

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.

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.

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

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.