The short story is the literature of the nomad.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.

When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.

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.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.