So what about me? Would I always have to find a high horse? The moral relish, the rising above, the being in the right, which can make me flaunt my losses.

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.

The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.

We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do-we do it all the time.

My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.

Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.

Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.

...one cannot but wonder how an environment can make people despair and sit idle and then, by changing the conditions, one can transform the same people into matchless performers.

We all spend our lives living beside the people we could have been.

...[D]eviance is an attributed designation rather than something inherent in individuals...

You have to pinpoint the market, and if you don't pinpoint the market, you won't be successful.

It's terrible what's going on in Chicago.

The youngest metal kids are less impressed by tradition, so you get metal that encompasses everything. It's not a defining kind of lifestyle and look.

The thing that usually gets me through the writing is that my feelings of wretched inadequacy are irregularly punctuated by brief flashes of omnipotence.

By associating with wise people you will become wise yourself.

It is strange how long we rebel against a platitude until suddenly in a different lingo it looms up again as the only verity.

These are six ways of courting defeat, which must be carefully noted by the general who has attained a responsible post.