There is no shame — having a dirty face — the shame comes when you keep it dirty.

The enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have.

She sounds the way bananas taste.

I despise people who can't control themselves.

Lee Harvey Oswald was boiling over about everything: the American ambassador; the Russians-he was mad at them because they wouldn't let him stay in Moscow. We talked to him for about half an hour, and my Italian friend didn't think the guy was worth filing a story about. Just another paranoid hysteric; the Moscow woods were rampant with those. I never thought about him again, not until many years later. Not until after the assassina­tion when I saw his picture flashed on television.

Yes: but aren't love and marriage notoriously synonymous in the minds of most women? Certainly very few men get the first without promising the second: love, that is--if it's just a matter of spreading her legs, almost any woman will do that for nothing.

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.