And I finished college because I thought how much it would upset my parents if I didnt.

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.

I don't buy the hype when everybody is saying how wonderful things are and how great I am, and I don't get too down when people say, "This is a disaster and he's done for."

Sometimes the truth don't rhyme, sometime the lies get millions of views, funerals for little girls is that appealing to you?

Even though people like to say Destroyer [albom] is gibberish and all that, I usually know exactly what I'm saying at every single moment.

The sooner that little so-and-so goes to rugby league, the better it will be for us.

Love alone makes us happy, because we live in relation, and we live to love and to be loved.

There are many things that, if I have to relive, maybe I will do it another way. But I would not like to look back and think what I have not been able to.

When the President does it, that means that it's not illegal.

There's plenty of room for all sorts of movies and all sorts of comedies, so I never saw that as a competitive thing. I think there's room in the marketplace for everything.

Because all of biology is connected, one can often make a breakthrough with an organism that exaggerates a particular phenomenon, and later explore the generality.

I'd never want to be Gene Simmons, an old man who puts on makeup to entertain kids, like a clown going to work.