When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.

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.

If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone.

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

The world that was not mine yesterday now lies spread out at my feet, a splendor. I seem, in the middle of the night, to have returned to the world of apples, the orchards of Heaven. Perhaps I should take my problems to a shrink, or perhaps I should enjoy the apples that I have, streaked with color like the evening sky.

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