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 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.

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.

My first debate in high school--"Resolved: Girls are no good"--and I won!

You have to be odd to be number one.

My soul is full of longing for the secret of the sea, and the heart of the great ocean sends a thrilling pulse through me.

It's absolutely fine to think of new ways of doing things, and I'm not just asking for the traditional reporter to look into our living rooms night after night.

At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off.

Do not read beauty magazines. They only make you feel ugly.

I don't care very much for the People Magazine approach to applied economics.

All who call the Holy Ghost a creature we pity, on the ground that, by this utterance, they are falling into the unpardonable sin of blasphemy against Him.

It's really exciting to be in a film that people actually want to go and see! I was having to pay people to see my movies!

Opinions have greater power than strength of hands.