How do I look so young? Quite simple: a complete vegetable diet, 12 hours sleep a night, and lots and lots of make-up.

The more you know about something, the harder it becomes. You become more and more of a perfectionist. I think it's a curse... It's a form of illness!

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.

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.

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.

I think to be a good teacher you need an enormous amount of patience and I'm a very impatient person.

I'm scarcely an enfant!