When the prisoner is brought down from Death Row he steps from the elevator directly into a "holding" room that adjoins the witness room. There are two cells in this "holding" room, two, in case it's a double execution. They're ordinary cells, just like this one, and the prisoner spends his last night there before his execu­tion in the morning, reading, listening to the radio, playing cards with the guards.

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

As long as you live, there's always something waiting; and even if it's bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can't stop living.

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.

[Y]outh is hardly human: it can't be, for the young never believe they will die...especially would they never believe that death comes, and often, in forms other than the natural one.

Most secrets should never be told, but especially those that are more menacing to the listener than to the teller.

People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie.