My first job was working in a dress shop in Los Angeles in 1940, for $7 a week.

I like to cook; it is, for me, a happy combination of mindlessness and purpose.

Life is all getting used to what you're not used to.

The minute you become conscious that you are doing good, that's the minute you have to stop because from then on it's wrong.

A year and a half after the end of the war and the German occupation, Paris was muted and looked bruised and forlorn. Everywhere I went, I sensed the tracks of the wolf that had tried to devour the city. But Paris proved inedible, as it had been ever since its tribal beginnings on an island in the Seine, the Ile de la Cité.

I was the goldfish that leapt out of the bowl.

I've always known a lot of very bad people, destructive, brutes of a certain kind. Then I've seen these lovely impulses and what not, and they've stayed with me and comforted me.