“Love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.”

Doctors, by God; washing their hands, looking out windows, fiddling with dreadful things while you are stretched out on a table or half undressed on a chair.

Falling in love is the easiest thing in the world. It’s standing in love that matters.

I once wrote a story about a writer who could not write anymore, and my friend Tennessee Williams said, ‘How could you dare write that story, it’s the most frightening work I have ever read.’ I was pretty well sunk while I was writing it.

I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?

I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely.

His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years.

This fear is one of the horrors of an author’s life. Where does work come from? What chance, what small episode will start the chain of creation?

It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.

I´m a stranger in a strange land.

The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.

She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram fall of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.

The bewildered soul can answer only: “Since I do not understand ‘Who I am,’ I only know what I am not.” The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate.

The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.

If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all. Often after you have sweated and tried and things are not better for you, there comes a feeling deep down in the soul that you are not worth much.

I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.

Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just – when all along we knew it wasn’t.