The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can’t, you’re dead

The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can't, you're dead.

Throughout my early career, I would write from five to ten in the morning every day before going to my office, a habit that has stayed with me since.

Only something extremely dire and disabling will ever stop a real writer from writing. Retirement is never an option.

The post-war loss of Churchill may have damaged the Western world with the same impact as the post-civil war world was damaged by the loss of Lincoln.

He's as nutty as a vegan T-bone.

I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.

I am only so beautiful as the character of my relationships, only so rich as I enrich those around me, only so alive as I enliven those I greet.

Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.

I like you very much. Just as you are.

It is shaming sometimes how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum’s sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush?

I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.

One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse.

The death of a library, any library, suggests that the community has lost its soul.

You can tell other people all the alibis you want. I don't mind. But to yourself try to be honest.