Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who'll get one.

Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It's misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm.

People who were so good. There were angels.

I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for awhile after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still. Another thing they taught was that no one was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, ‘You know – you never wrote a story with a villain in it.’ I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.

All right - I'll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me.