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

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.

You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

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.

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.