I went out into the world when I was about 22. I wrote books and I illustrated books and did book covers, and I taught tap-dancing, and I was a model in the art school. I had no ability for any of those things, but what else could I do?

Happiness is the only thing I understand.

I stay in one room, and it's easier to live there, to control it, to make it warm. It seems to me a convenient way to live, and it's cheap.

I don't believe in convention at all. I do what I have to do to stay alive.

I'm happy. I don't ever have to pay anything, and I don't ever have to wash the dishes, and I don't ever have to behave nicely.

Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.

It's been agony but I couldn't have done it any other way.