“Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it… Success is shy – it won’t come out while you’re watching.”

We are all of us born, live and die in the shadow of a giant question mark that refers to three questions: Where do we come from? Why? And where, oh where, are we going!

I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person.

He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.

When you’re going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.

I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.

That time is short and it doesn’t return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.

The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.

You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it.

Devils can be driven out of the heart by the touch of a hand on a hand, or a mouth on a mouth.

Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other.

Not facing a fire doesn’t put it out.

It is planned speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so spontaneously in one instant.

At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.

You can play some schlock like New Kids On the Block.

I don’t know how many of you have been to New York, but if a building is two blocks away from anything, you can’t see it.

When we were at the Apollo, Holiday was a block away. I asked her for her autograph.

I like that Pilates compromises the mind and body. It’s not just about being able to run around the block a few times.

Everybody was happy my brother was locked up.

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart.

It ain’t made for everybody, but I knocked a lot of blocks down.