I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, overinvolved and overexcited in the way you are when you're a kid and you think you've found a soul mate in the new boy down the street and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don't normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to.

--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others

Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.

I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.

It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.

That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration

I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.