Half the world's work is done by hopeless neurotics.

You know you're walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can't because everybody else thinks it's your face.

Another person's life, observed from the outside, always has a shape and definition that one's own life lacks.

Looking straight at the world is part of your duty as a writer.

Murder is only killing in the wrong place.

The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.

Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem for the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.