I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.

And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.

He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement.

I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy.

An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

She was not one for emptying her face of expression.

He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.

You don't know how to talk to people you don't like. Don't love, really. You can't live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.

But I was afraid of the questions (much more than the accusations) you might both put to me.

I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck.

They call him Aslan in That Place, " said Eustace."What a curious name!""Not half so curious as himself, " said Eustace solemnly.

You can become a shining light for others.

You mean less to me than the dog s__t I scraped off the bottom of my shoe!

Everybody has the same amount of time during the day. You can either spend your time or invest your time.

There's no doubt that we have, as we always do in the nation, reacted to the reality of 911 here in the country as an aviation incident. There are other vulnerabilities to be dealt with.

Make a little room in your plans for romance again, Anne, girl. All the degrees and scholarships in the world can’t make up for the lack of it. ~Aunt Josephine to Anne in Anne Of Green Gables

Love and grief enable us to feel how we're all at heart the same. In love and grief, which is always very personal, the distinctions that separate us melt away.

For neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.

Judaism is important to me from a tribal point of view.

It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.