The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

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

I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth-whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

I have always been the lover - never the beloved - and I have spent much of my life waiting for trains, planes, boats, footsteps, doorbells, letters, telephones, snow, rain, thunder.

That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.