The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.

He resented such questions as people do who have thought a great deal about them. The superficial and slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization. The vanity (if not outrage) of trying to cage this dance of atoms in a single definition may give the weariness of age with the cry of youth for answers the appearance of boredom.

Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.

The rich aren't like us, they pay less taxes.

Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy.