It is possible to stand around with a cocktail in one’s hand and talk with everyone, which means with no one.

People say, “Well, you went on television, it enlarged your readership.” It did not at all, not at all. I might as well tell you, I lost some readership, because the profound audience felt somehow bothered by my too easy manner.

You don’t die in the United States, you underachieve.

It’s not that you aren’t likable. On the contrary. You are. It’s just that one wonders if you haven’t made a career out of being so likable.

I do like to live in other people’s homes. I enjoy being a guest. I am an inexpensive guest. When one lives in another’s home he can enter into the psychic kingdom of that person.

Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer’s life.

And really the purpose of art – for me, fiction – is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have.

Wouldn’t it be easier to change people’s eyes and hair than to build big furnaces and then catch Jews and Gypsies to burn them?

All my life I’ve been hiding.

Lovers are not snails; they don’t have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.