Work is the only device I know of.

Norman Mailer thinks William Burroughs is a genius, which I think is ludicrous beyond words. I don't think William Burroughs has an ounce of talent.

would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick.

The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.

I met Lee Harvey Oswald, in Moscow just after he defected. One night I was having dinner with a friend, an Italian newspaper cor­respondent, and when he came by to pick me up he asked me if I'd mind going with him first to talk to a young American defector, one Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was staying at the Metropole, an old Czarist hotel just off Kremlin Square.

It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.

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.