I graduated in 1952 and went to Europe, with Niki and our first child Laura, who was then a year old.

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.

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.

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not.

The most heinous crime is to disappoint those who trust in you

She hadn't seen a doctor cry before, they usually don't, that makes itharder.- Anita

Humility is the nearly impossible task of being more concerned with our own sins that we are with the sins of others.

I think the film gives you a picture of a person. It gives you a complete picture.

It is good to vary in order that you may frustrate the curious, especially those who envy you.

It's unthinkable not to love - you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.

Those whose character is mean and vicious will rouse others to animosity against them.