Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Never love a wild thing...If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.

...there was a blond misty boy sitting beside me, and he looked at me, and I at him, and we were not strangers: our hands moved towards each other to embrace. I never heard his voice, for we did not speak; it is a shame, I should so like the memory of it. Loneliness, like fever, thrives on night, but there with him light broke, breaking in the trees like birdsong, and when sunrise came, he loosened his fingers from mine, and walked away, that misty boy, my friend.

I think my greatest talent really is for friendship.

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

You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

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.