There is this thing called the university, and everybody goes there now. And there are these things called teachers who make students read this book with good ideas or that book with good ideas until that's where we get our ideas. We don't think them; we read them in books. I like Utopian talk, speculation about what our planet should be, anger about what our planet is. I think writers are the most important members of society, not just potentially but actually. Good writers must have and stand by their own ideas.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

The Contessa was surely way ahead of her time, too, in believing that men were not only usless and idiotic, but downright dangerous. That idea wouldn't catch on big in her native country until the last three years of the Vietnam War.

His mother understood my illness immediately, that it was my world rather than myself that was diseased.

The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.

It's a terrible waste to be happy and not notice it.

Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch: everything stops.