I was rather a goody-goody as a child... It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it.

The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.

What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, the squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material.

The great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo.

she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.

There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had

He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.

...all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.

To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, 'vulgar and unsafe' --- that was the worst thing.

I would rather walk alone in the light than with many in the dark doom.

No one can know what happiness is if you have not gone through the disappointmentOne can only savor the victory if he has felt the bitter defeat.

Someone like Mozart moves from Salzburg to Vienna, where all of the sudden he finds this musical city that is not only asking for music, it's demanding music of him.

It's not like I've been vaulting my whole life. I haven't. So my body hasn't taken that physical beating. I'm still on the upscale.

Do not attempt to conquer the world with force, for force only causes resistance.

There is nowhere to go. What you are looking for is right here. Open the fist clenched in wanting and see what you already hold in your hand

We muckraked, not because we hated our world, but because we loved it. We were not hopeless, we were not cynical, we were not bitter.

The only trick was never giving more that you were willing to lose.

What a lot of things I don't need.

Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.