Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love- you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you're over. You've caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.

Sanity ... is the most profound moral option of our time.

The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems.

Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in literature.

Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation.

There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.

Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them.