[In art] you are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition.

I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.

But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.

Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.

I couldn't stand it. I still can't stand it. I can't stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age.

The so-called sexual revolution is not, as advertised, a liberation of sexual behavior but rather its reversal. In former days, even under Victoria, sexual intercourse was the natural end and culmination of heterosexual relations. Now one begins with genital overtures instead of a handshake, then waits to see what will turn up (e.g., might become friends later). Like dogs greeting each other nose to tail and tail to nose.

Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.