Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.

Chamber music - a conversation between friends.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

What the writer needs is an empty day ahead.

Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours.

If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.

There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.

Forget boys and read a good book. Or study. When you're twenty-five and ranking in the big bucks, men will be falling all over you're a successful professional woman.

However, as every parent of a small child knows, converting a large object into small fragments is considerably easier than the reverse process.

My favorite film is "Meshes in the Afternoon," a short avant garde film directed by Maya Deren. This was the first film that I saw that was actually directed by a woman.

Let a man of genius make use [of photography] as it should be used, and he will raise himself to a height that we do not know.

I try to use pain as fuel for my work.

To be free and to live a free life - that is the most beautiful thing there is.

I definitely try to broaden the scope of music. I don't know if it's pop or classical or what, but I'm religiously challenging myself all the time, for better or for worse.

The worst thing I can do is nothing.

Love's a fire that needs renewal Of fresh beauty for its fuel.

I taught myself to name my name, To bark back, loosen love and crying; To ease my woman so she came, To ease an old man who was dying.