I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy.

And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.

He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement.

I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.

An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

She was not one for emptying her face of expression.

He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.

You don't know how to talk to people you don't like. Don't love, really. You can't live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.

But I was afraid of the questions (much more than the accusations) you might both put to me.

I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck.

I sometimes refer to economics as a woman. To me the subject was always a she. People would ask me why. Easy. She's obviously a woman: all the men are trying to do her, and mostly they're failing.

... one may live in a big house and yet have no comfort.

In politics guts is all.

Sometimes I forget when I read a book that it didn't exist in English first.

Often out of periods of losing come the greatest strivings toward a new winning streak.

Prizefighting ain't the noblest of arts and I ain't the noblest artist

I think that's what's great about being an actress is you get to learn so many different things like that, like learning a little bit of Tibetan here, learning a Southern accent there.

I have a brother who's a psychologist. He says three-quarters of the world are born feeling that they will be affected by the world; one quarter are born knowing that they will affect the world

We aren't going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.

As American education and intelligence becomes replaced by feelings and emotion, not seeing the forest for the trees has become a major problem.