“I can be quite sarcastic when I’m in the mood.”

That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any.

The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has — I’m not kidding.

I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

Listen, if you’re not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh.

Grand. There’s a word I really hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

We don’t talk, we hold forth. We don’t converse, we expound.

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody.

It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.

You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.

I’m up to my ears in unwritten words.

I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do.

I mean they don’t seem able to love us just the way we are. They don’t seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more.

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

The good and wise lead quite lives.

I feel so alone sometimes. The night is quiet for me.

Sometimes I say things that I think are obviously sarcastic and people take them quite literally.

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

I feel more of a person than a child, I feel quite indepedent of anyone.

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God.

People in life, when they have a tendency to exaggerate or lie or whatever, you always sort of notice that their voice goes up quite high.

You must be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.