There isn't a king or a merchant prince in the whole world that I envy, for I always knew I was born to be a child of destiny and that I was never meant to wring my living from detestable, low, degrading, mean and ordinary kinds of business.

Now working is terribly painful and I'm still having a fight with the booze. I've enlisted the help of a doctor but it's touch and go. A day for me; a day for the hootch.

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

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

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

I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.

The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.