Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?

Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.

You can get all A's and still flunk life.

There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.

My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.

I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.

[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.