Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don’t put them on paper.
The problem with living outside the law is that you no longer have its protection.
All literature is gossip.
Leave it to me: I’m always top banana in the shock department.
I don’t mean I’d mind being rich and famous. That’s very much on my schedule and someday I’ll try to get around to it.
Home is where you feel at home. I’m still looking.
Oh Jesus God we did belong to each other. He was mine.
June, July, all through the warm months she hibernated like a winter animal who did not know spring had come and gone.
She took off her dark glasses and squinted at me. It was as though her eyes were shattered prisms, the dots of blue and gray and green like broken bits of sparkle.
A disquieting loneliness came into my life, but it induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet.
New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.
I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon.
The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.
I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.
She had only one flaw. She was perfect, otherwise whe was perfect.
I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn’t being pious. Just practical. Cancer may cool you, but the other’s sure to.
She sounds the way bananas taste.
She is pure Alice in Wonderland, and her appearance and demeanor are a nicely judged mix of the Red Queen and a Flamingo.
There’s got to be something wrong with us. To do what we did.
We all, sometimes, leave each other there under the skies, and we never understand why.
I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years.