Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.

Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.

Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

Was there ever in anyone’s life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?

You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.

Call me the author.

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.