“popular culture is where we go to talk to and agree with one another; to simplify ourselves; to find our herd. Its like going to the Automat to buy an emotion. The thrills are cheap and the payoffs...”

“In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the same of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.”

“To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms.”

“Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.”

“Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?”

“It seems to me that my whole life I've been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. And the first person I had to rescue was myself.”

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.”