Good luck and believe me, dearest Doc - it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.

The way his plump hand clutched at her hip seemed somehow improper; not morally, aesthetically.

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

Randolph," he said, "were you ever as young as me?" And Randolph said: "I was never so old.

I knew Lee Harvey Oswald, and I knew Jack Kennedy. The odds against that-one person knowing all four of those men-must be astounding.

You can’t give your heart to a wild thing.

At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it-it will haunt you till it's written.