I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.