Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence.

There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night.

So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.

The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.

One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.

When I read it ["Tough Guys Don't Dance"], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop.