Write about the things that attract you. Choose your subjects the way you used to choose your toys: out of desire.

I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy and France to become someone else through my fluency in the language.

My idea was to go to Vienna to study conducting and perhaps play in an orchestra first, so I thought before I got to Vienna I could do with a little training in Paris.

And then, when I left Princeton in the middle of my sophomore year, I went into the navy.

I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches.

There are many things I’ve written that I didn’t really understand until a long time later.

I left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952.

You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.

I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, for a while, about which the less said the better, and then I was in the Mediterranean, about which the more said the better.

I graduated in 1952 and went to Europe, with Niki and our first child Laura, who was then a year old.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the readers opportunities to follow it at every step.

Religious freedom is too sacred a right to be restricted or prohibited in any degree without convincing proof that a legitimate interest of the state is in grave danger.

We don't really need reviewers, just first-night reporters who will tell us faithfully whether or not the audience liked the show.

Is your integrity at the level of the thing you are praying for?

I have some strategical vision, I could calculate some few moves ahead and I have an intellect that is badly missed in the country which is run by generals and colonels.

Since I have spread my wings to purpose high, The more beneath my feet the clouds I see, The more I give the winds my pinions free, Spurning the earth and soaring to the sky.

Today, use your words to lift up and bless the people around you.

In drying plants, botanists often dry themselves. Dry words and dry facts will not fire hearts.

We both can be the most beautiful and benevolent creatures on the planet, but then there's another side that can be as harsh and as ugly as the darkest thing you could imagine seeing.

I have sought for happiness everywhere, but I have found it nowhere except in a little corner with a little book.

Lovers ever run before the clock