Drinking isn't necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can't drink without thinking you're killing yourself.

No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.

When a woman drinks it's as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It's a slur on the divine in our nature.

a writer is a foreign country

Their voices reach out into the empty yard, plunge deep into the hills, go right through the heart.

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.