Technically I feel total fluidity in writing. I feel there's nothing technically that I can't do the way a certain sort of pianist feels that. But that doesn't mean it comes easily. It doesn't.

I think the only person a writer has an obligation to is himself. If what I write doesn't fulfill something in me, if I don't honestly feel it's the best I can do, then I'm miserable.

June, July, all through the warm months she hibernated like a winter animal who did not know spring had come and gone.

There was an American girl, Priscilla Johnson. She worked for U.P. in Moscow. She knew [John] Kennedy, and she met [Lee Harvey] Oswald around the same time I did. But I can tell you some­thing else almost as curious.

The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.

Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.

They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurerance of our identities? I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was so egotist...he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the beautiful comrade, the only inseparatable love...poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.