Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 A.M. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.