Admite the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.

How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.

Without a reader, I cannot write. It's like a kiss: they cannot be done alone.

I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.

Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.

My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city's boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.