Love is a joint experience between two persons -- but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.

There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.

I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.

Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.

justice itself is a chimera, a delusion. Justice is not a flat yardstick, applied in equal measure to an equal situation.

The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.

The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.

I want - I want - I want - was all that she could think about - but just what this real want was she did not know.

It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.

There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall.

We are homesick most for the places we have never known.

The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.

Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.

I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.

The writer is by nature a dreamer - a conscious dreamer.

How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?

To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.

Falling in love is the easiest thing in the world. It's standing in love that matters.

I was punched breathless by the strongest emotions I have ever felt and they are now stored in my intuition as a writer.