California is a place where...the mind is troubled by some...suspicion that things had better work here, because here,beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent

She had to have a telephone. There was no one to whom she wanted to talk but she had to have a telephone.

I think we are all well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

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.

Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean love in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.

If you don't play the game, you shouldn't make the rules.

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

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.

I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point.