This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.

He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist’s success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Freud… studied his own dreams not because he was a “narcissist,” but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?

The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.

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

I think you're a wonder. You're beautiful. You're mature. You are, I admit, vastly more experienced than I am. That's what threw me. I was thrown. Forgive me.

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.

The only way to have a funeral is to invite everyone who ever knew the person and just wait for the accident to happen-somebody who comes in out of the blue and says the truth. Everything else is table manners.