I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.

A ring of gold with the sun in it? Lies. Lies and a grief.

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

It's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

It is best to meet in a cul-de-sac, A palace of velvet With windows of mirrors. There one is safe, There are no family photographs, No rings through the nose, no cries.

I thought if only I had a keen, shapely bone structure to my face or could discuss politics shrewdly or was a famous writer Constantin might find me interesting enough to sleep with. And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.

I think if I had done anything else I would like to have been a doctor. This is the sort of polar opposition to being a writer, I suppose.