The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.

The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.

I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling around.

The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!

... politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.

Perhaps this very instant is your time.

Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.

...in a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.

Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.

I have lost faith in universal panaceas - work is the one thing in which I really believe.

We must love our slaves, Papa. We must love them as hard as we are able.

It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.

Common sense is a tool that isn't in everyone's shed.

I have arrived more definitely than any other painter during his lifetime

Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose.

I haven't cried since Mom died. I mean, after something like that, what's left to cry about, right? But I let myself cry now. Loss is loss. Doesn't take death to create it. (266)

Your heart is the face of your spirit, it holds everything you have been, you are, and what you are going to be.

I started selling insurance in 1979 and continued doing that until 1985 when I opened my own insurance firm.

You can't always be a leading lady.

If I ended my career, I wouldn't mind doing a TV series if it was a western and I played a mute gunfighter so I wouldn't have to remember lines every week.