He hated it when you called him a moron. All morons hate it when you call them a moron.
Oh, God, if I’m anything by a clinical name, I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I think people are plotting to make me happy.
You beautiful little moron.
It was against my principles and all, but I was feeling so depressed I didn’t even think. That’s the whole trouble. When you’re feeling very depressed, you can’t even think.
I purely came over because I thought you looked extremely lonely. You have an extremely sensitive face.
Our foyer has a funny smell that doesn’t smell like anyplace else. I don’t know what the hell it is. It isn’t cauliflower and it isn’t perfume – I don’t know what the hell it is – but you always know you’re home.
New York is terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night.
Every tune I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I’d never get to the other side of the street. I thought I’d just go down, down, down, and nobody’d ever see me again.
My opinions are all too frequently too damn harsh for words.
Sometimes I talk a little loud when I get excited.
Then, as though he had suddenly become exhausted-or, rather, depleted by the demands made on him by a world greedy for the fruit of his intellect-he began to massage the side of his face with the flat of his hand, removing, with unconscious crassness, a bit of sleep from one eye.
This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I’m still around, but from here on in, for reasons I’m not at liberty to disclose, I’ve disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.
But my parents, especially my mother, she has ears like a goddam bloodhound. So I took it very, very easy when I went past their door. I even held my breath, for God’s sake. You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won’t wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she’ll hear you.
You never get to sit next to the window any more when you’re married.
These intellectual guys don’t like to have an intellectual conversation with you unless they’re running the whole thing.
You’re going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you’ve got to start going there.
A lot of people, especially this one psychoanalyst guy they have here, keeps asking me if I’m going apply myself when I go back to school next September. It’s such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean how do you know what you’re going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don’t. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it’s a stupid question.
That’s depressing, when somebody says “please” to you.
I think that one of these days,” he said, “you’re going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you’ve got to start going there.
Boy, did he depress me! I don’t mean he was a bad guy- he wasn’t. But you don’t have to be a bad guy to depress somebody- you can be a good guy and do it. All you have to do to depress somebody is give them a lot of phony advice while you’re looking for your initials in some can door- that’s all you have to do. I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t been all out of breath.