It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might end up loving some of them. And who knows what might happen to you then?

Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.

How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.

If you're interested in how people behave, if you're interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it's very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation.

So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, "It's nothing." "Self-inflicted. You pathetic American." "Different kind of prison" Chip said.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.