I loved her enough to forget myself, my self pitying despairs, and be content that something she thought happy was going to happen.

I knew Lee Harvey Oswald, and I knew Jack Kennedy. The odds against that-one person knowing all four of those men-must be astounding.

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

But, my dear, so few things are fulfilled: what are most lives but a series of incompleted episodes? 'We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task...' It is wanting to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something.

all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.

I think most people are very, very much motivated by sex - greed, sex, and hunger.

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.