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

It’s hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don’t want to write.

The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn’t so funny.

Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.

Don’t you think there is always something unspoken between two people?

Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that’s true of everyone, don’t you?

And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.

Men don’t want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly.

To be free is to have achieved your life.

A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts.

The woman spread her legs, and made me look between them. All I could see was something that looked like a dyin’ orchid; consequently, I have never been comfortable around women or orchids.

The name of a person you love is more than language.

All good art is an indiscretion.

Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

All creative work, all life in a sense, is a cri de coeur.

Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.