There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.

Chamber music - a conversation between friends.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.

What the writer needs is an empty day ahead.

Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours.

If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.

You want to go back, and so you hold on to the habits you learned while you were traveling, because it's better than admitting the journey's over.

Yeah, baby! And you are the magnet and I'm the steel! Bring to me your leather, take from me my lace!

Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age.

Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.

New York's a big playground. I have a bike, and I'm really into just being outside. Especially in the summertime.

I saw a muskrat come out of a hole in the ice ... While I am looking at him, I am thinking what he is thinking of me. He is a different sort of man, that's all.

When you're trying to free yourself from a religion that has been ingrained in you since childhood, it's more like ripping out your veins and tendons.

It must infuriate our children to see us always so much more forbearing with everybody else's.

A good man is hard to find," she said wistfully. "Not everyone is as lucky as you are.

Those who have much to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.