In violence, we forget who we are

As soon as you become a writer, you lose contact with ordinary experience or tend to. ... the worst fate of a writer is to become a writer.

When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable.

It [Socialism] was a kind of political hockey played by big, gaunt, dyspeptic girls in pants.

As subjects, we all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story. We cannot believe that it is finished, that we are 'finished,' even though we may say so; we expect another chapter, another installment, tomorrow or next week.