I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.

And there's the fallacy of existence: the idea that one could be happy forever and age with a given situation or series of accomplishments.

If there's anything I look down on, it's a man in a blue outfit.

When I fell out of the light, I entered The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.

I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.

I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.

My wanting to write books annihilates the original root impulse that would have me bravely and blunderingly working on them.