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 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 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.

The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto?

Family holidays and weekends are really brightly colored memories, full of my mother and father, rather than our nannies and au pairs.

Love of glory can only create a great hero contempt of glory creates a great man.

Your karma is the sum total of your awareness field. Your awareness field is comprised of all the experiences that you've had in this life and all other lives.

I can deal with your judgment, because I've always marched to the beat of my own drummer--ever since i cut my camp shirt into a halter top.

If, in short, there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be me.

My father taught in the wise way which unfolds what lies in the child

Time itself is our tragedy and most of us are fighting some kind of war against it.

Broken necks, splattered patellas, severed arteries: These are the things from which dreams are made of.

My purpose is to paint the life of my people as I know it.