The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

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

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

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

I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.

Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.