I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal..

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

At first, there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you. By the time you realize these are the same, it can be too ….

Did you ever notice how easy it is to forgive a person any number of faults for one endearing characteristic, for a certain style, or some commitment….

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

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

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

I have a superstition that if I talk about plot, it's like letting sand out of a hole in the bottom of a bag..

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..

There is balance in life, but not fairness..

When people say of their tragedies, 'I don't often think of it now,' what they mean is it has entered permanently into their thoughts, and colors eve….

Going to Europe, someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no-one returned the same.….

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead..

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

What you fear most will happen to you - that is the law..

In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two….

Since the moment of the United Nations' inception, untold energies have been expended by governments not only toward the exclusion of persons of prin….

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

I never had, or wished for, power over you. That isn't true, of course. I wanted the greatest power of all. but not advantage, or authority..

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

Marriage is like democracy - it doesn't really work, but it's all we've been able to come up with..