She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.

It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.

I believe that love cannot be bought except with love.

Once you have lived in New York and made it your home, no place else is good enough

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species. --speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962

People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.