“I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.”

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.

Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.

Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.

In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.

Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss.

For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and valor. Of the endless fluid passage of the humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who – one word- love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him, he felt a warning, a shaft of terror.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all – that has been my religion.

I started to take a keen interest in food when I was 16 years old.