if you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want.

Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love..

And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life..

Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around..

He knew it was possible for shame to be nursed and doctored like an illness, if you wanted to keep it separate from the rest of your life, but that d….

No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying..

Can you really think artists and writers are the only people entitled to lives of their own?.

if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone..

If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy..

In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field..

If you haven't written a novel by the time you're forty you never will!.

Synchronize watches at oh six hundred' says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds respite from fear in the act of bringing ….

When you wrote it didn't matter if hysteria sometimes came up in your face and voice (unless, of course, you let it find its way into your "literary ….

Hard work, is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man- and of woman..

It haunted him all night, while he slept alone; it was still there in the morning, when he swallowed his coffee and backed down the driveway in the c….

...you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and “We’ve got to be together in this thing” when you meant the very opposite ... and then you we….

Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence..

Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn't that the God damndest thing?.

Why did everything always change when all you wanted, all you had ever humbly asked of whatever God there might be, was that certain things be allowe….

He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive..

What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you've started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were say….