Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don't put them on paper.

I've never worked for a newspaper. I've had some very bad reviews in newspapers.

I live in Brooklyn. By choice. Those ignorant of its allures are entitled to wonder why.

Shoot, boy, the country's just fulla folks what knows everything, and don't understand nothing, just fullofem.

The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His work means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning.

Did you ever, in that wonderland wilderness of adolesence [sic] ever, quite unexpectedly, see something, a dusk sky, a wild bird, a landscape, so exquisite terror touched you at the bone? And you are afraid, terribly afraid the smallest movement, a leaf, say, turning in the wind, will shatter all? That is, I think, the way love is, or should be: one lives in beautiful terror.

I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matter of emptying your head of all other sounds. Being very quiet and listening very hard. Sometimes I still believe that. But one can never get quiet enough.