Life was an impenetrable mystery cloaked in babble.

I have a painter's memory. I can remember things from my childhood which were so powerfully imprinted on me, the whole scene comes back.

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

When I begin a story at my desk, the window to my back, the path is not there. As I start to walk, I make the path.

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.

Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.

There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one's vision of the past.