When I tried to do something else, everyone behaved as if I was Gypsy Rose Lee trying to paint a Matisse.

...what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends , there's nothing left.

For most people, honesty is such an unusual departure from their standard modus operandi - such an abherration in their workaday mendacity - that they feel obliged to alert you when a moment of sincerity is coming on.

It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mistery.

When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence.

There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized.

Somewhere between sanity and madness lays a fine line, for some it is a tightrope walked daily, a fight for balance to be won or lost. That fight is lost one of two ways. Some simply lose their balance and fall, others are pushed.