all great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.

I know you have much to bear with in me, and I really do sometimes in you, but I have never looked at friendship in a deep sense as easy or entirely comfortable.

I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.

I loved them all the way one loves at any age -- if it's real at all -- obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them, I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world -- and in a way I suppose they were.

May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best - out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.

Being very rich as far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.

[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious . . .