Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn't that the God damndest thing?

Every man has a right to keep his own sentiments if he pleases.

In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.

Warren Cox, God knew, was no prize; a commercial person, a sales person, the kind of man who said things like "x numbers of dollars". At lunch today, laboriously trying to explain some business procedure, he had said "x number of dollars" three times.

If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.

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.

Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.