I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches.

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.

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.

My dream, I remember, when I went to boarding school, was to have a study all my own, a little nook someplace where nobody could get at me - nobody, like the football coach.

I am always at home even when I am traveling to exotic places because this world is my home.

Yesterday was good, but let us dream and work hard to make tomorrow even better.

Though you can get smart from reading everything that a smart person writes, you cannot get famous from reading about everything that a famous person does or is said to have done.

Mum is the word.

In my opinion, Louis Armstrong is the greatest trumpet stylist of all time and has influenced every trumpet player of his time and long after

Friendship's said to be a plant of tedious growth, its root composed of tender fibers, nice in their taste, cautious in spreading.

Adaptability cushions the impact of change or disappointment.

All of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly - right now.

Intelligence reports say Castro is very worried about me. I'm very worried that we can't come up with something to justify his worrying.

I will aim to restore the Japan-U.S. alliance and Japan's strong diplomatic capabilities. Japan can't pursue a strong foreign policy without strengthening its alliance with the United States.