Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.

Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more.

Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.

Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.