She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.

What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -

The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.

Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.

The really important thing is not to reject anything.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.

Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.

I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all

The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.