Madness is like intelligence, you know. You can't explain it. Just like intelligence. It comes on you, it fills you, and then you understand it. But when it goes away you can't understand it at all any longer.

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

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

For that's what a woman, a mother wants - to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it's safer for them to be interested in other people's happiness than to believe in their own.

When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you.

He wanted to pay her; he thought women ought to be paid for keeping men from dying or going out of their minds.

Words don't change their shape, they change their meaning, their function...They don't have a meaning of their own any more, they refer to other words that you don't know, that you've never read or heard...you've never seen their shape, but you feel...you suspect...they correspond to...an empty space inside you...or in the universe.