Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.

The hell with "love" anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world.

There's never been anything funny about a woman dying for love.

Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.

Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.

When you wrote it didn't matter if hysteria sometimes came up in your face and voice (unless, of course, you let it find its way into your "literary voice") because writing was done in merciful privacy and silence. Even if you were partly out of your mind it might turn out to be all right: you could try for control even harder than Blanche Dubois was said to have tried, and with luck you could still bring off a sense of order and sanity on the page for the reader. Reading, after all, was a thing done in privacy and silence too.

...his job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony.