... one doesn't really profit from experience; one merely learns to predict the next mistake.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

There is balance in life, but not fairness.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.

Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.

In thoughts one keeps a reserve of hope, in spite of everything. You cannot say good-bye in imagination. That is something you can only do in actuality.

Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness.

I know what I want.

Dream on it, think on it, ink on it, speak on it... then proceed to bring on it. Fulfillment is ordered to find you. Shine time!

A lot of high school students on TV and in Broadway are played by people in their late 20s and even early 30s. That seems weird to me.

I love Jet Li, he's really special.

I landed in this country with $2.50 in cash and $1 million in hopes, and those hopes never left me.

The dilemma for women - writing after everything else was finished - has prevented women from reaching their literary potential for centuries.

I'm only going to be the way I'd want someone to react to me.

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

Love is hate War is Peace No is Yes And we're all free.