She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.

Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.

She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.

One day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of.

Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.

I do not wear my emotions on my sleeve. I was once described by my own son Stephen as an emotional ostrich.

I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

I don't even like old cars. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.

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

It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.

The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.

If a child shows himself to be incorrigible, he should be decently and quietly beheaded at the age of twelve, lest he grow to maturity, marry, and perpetuate his kind.

…because I was only eleven years old, I was wrapped in the best cloak of invisibility in the world.

The size of your audience is more important than the size of your book

People with HIV are still stigmatized. The infection rates are going up. People are dying. The political response is appalling. The sadness of it, the waste.

Playing from deep grass is a fact of life in professional golf.

Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot.

I like to have a simple workplace.

There's nothing you can say that won't make you seem ungrateful or rude.

I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.

Morality is how you go about getting what you want without screwing anybody to get it.