One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.

I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.

Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.

The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter.

I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.

Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.

My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.