I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule and someday I'll try to get around to it.

I've got something inside of me, peasantlike and stubborn, and I'm in it till the end of the race.

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

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.

That's all a writer has to write about - what he sees and hears and what not.

The brain may take advice, but not the heart.

All human life has its seasons and cycles, and no one's personal chaos can be permanent. Winter, after all, gives way to spring and summer, though sometimes when branches stay dark and the earth cracks with ice, one thinks they will never come, that spring, and that summer, but they do, and always.