Of all psychic conditions, anxiety verging upon paranoia/hysteria is perhaps the most contagious, even among men.

The first sentence can't be written until the final sentence is written.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.

Why I came to have such quarrels with my mother, to hate and wish dead my mother, I don’t know. There was hardly anything she ever told me didn’t turn out to be true.

Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely – perhaps never – furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you’ve ruined both our lives.

That glass sliver in the heart. Amid a fluttery-delicious Benzedrine rush, virtually every remark made to you is freighted with destiny, a sweet-painful stab in the heart. And Benzedrine and champagne, what a combination! The Blond Actress was only just discovering what everybody else in Hollywood knew.

I am infatuated with the private life, and with anonymity; perhaps even invisibility.

I would know of myself through the witnessing and naming of others. As Jesus in the Gospels is only seen and spoken of and recorded by others. I would know my existence and the value of that existence through others’ eyes, which I believed I could trust as I could not trust my own.

You can’t deny Eros. Eros wills trike, like lightning. Our human defenses are frail, ludicrous. Like plasterboard houses in a hurricane. Your triumph is in perfect submission. And the god of Eros will flow through you, as Lawrence says, in the ’perfect obliteration of blood consciousness.

And so it became a household of silence as if in the aftermath of a violent detonation.