I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.

I've had aunts and uncles who not only haven't read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.

I had my bully, and it was excruciating. Not only the bully, but the intimidation I felt.

It's amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.

Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.

And he did see--that life was rotten, that there were no heroes, really, and that you couldn't trust anybody, not even yourself.

Why did the wise guys always accuse other people of being wise guys?

They don't actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it's their thing too.

I have lived a thousand lives lost within the pages of a book.

The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn't flowers grow out of dirt?

Affection is one of the most neglected words in the English language, that people throw the word love around like confetti when they mean affection.

The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last November.

An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea.

Wild men, screaming through the keyholes.

I didn't find this memoir of these two eccentric people so different from doing my memoirs of De Sade or Simone Weil. My parents in their own way are as odd as Sade.

The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place.

I made my last motion picture in March 1965 for Magna Pictures. 'Harlow,' based on the life of actress Jean Harlow... I didn't know at the time that 'Harlow' would be my last motion picture.

Who taught you to hate yourself?

What lasts is what is written. We look to literature to find the essence of an age.

Gratitude is the great multiplier.

A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself.