If Francoise Sagan hadn't written a book called A Chateau in Sweden, I would certainly write a short story called A Chateau in Puerto Rico. And I may yet.

When I'm writing, I never write more than four hours a day.

I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.

If you can't be friends with a lover, then forget it. It's not going to work.

I think to be a good teacher you need an enormous amount of patience and I'm a very impatient person.

Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living.

If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stove, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours.