Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.

Over the years, I've found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to 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.

Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be."... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.

I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.

We're all divided souls, we've got two natures in us, You measure schizophrenia not by the fact that you're divided but how well the divisions speak to one another.

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.