Sometimes you get tired of riding in taxicabs the same way you get tired riding in elevators. All of a sudden, you have to walk, no matter how far or how high up.

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.

We can never be gods, after all--but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.

The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced.

My earliest childhood memory is watching the sunlight through a jar of amber full of wasps.

Be prepared for negative responses sometimes. It doesn't have anything to do with you. It's just sometimes you're not the right look, or you're not really what they were envisioning.

There are certain areas which ISIS has the oil and you take the oil, you keep it. You just go in and take it.

I like doing other things. I like getting high, hanging out with my kids. I like drinking. I have so many demons.

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

Love is the bright foreigner, the foreign self.

(3) 'IS IT A SYSTEM...?' ... Ultimately, I suspect, this is a question about which the reader should form his own judgement by study of the original text.

I feel that the most important requirement in success is learning to overcome failure. You must learn to tolerate it, but never accept it