Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.

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.

If a Black mother says she had a dream, listen. They are psychic.

We are what we pretend to be so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Men are not our problem; it's what we are trying to get from them that messes us up. We use guys like mirrors to see if we're valuable.

The first thing the secretary types is the boss.

You can't expect everyone to love you. I'm not someone who just wants to throw out hate, just because.

For the devil is better pleased with coarse blockheads and with folks who are useful to nobody; because where such characters abound, then things do not go on prosperously here on earth.

Sometimes I dress like what I want for lunch, because all I can think about is having a tuna sandwich.

Many people don't allow themselves to love...because there are a lot of things at risk a lot of future and a lot of past.

Winston Churchill was a man of blood and a politico without principle, whose apotheosis serves to corrupt every standard of honesty and morality in politics and history.

To live in the moment and in the future at the same time would seem to me to be the trick.