I have an idea that most of all he is running away from love, because it's too big and too demanding. He's running away from us--from you, from me, from his sister, from himself, too. Who wants to be himself, who wants to be so little, and so captured and limited?

San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.

The best that can be said for anybody is probably that you misunderstood him favorably.

All writers are discontent. That's because they're aware of a potential and believe they're not reaching it.

I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.

Two years ago your father died, Ulysses. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us.

Yes, the idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.