the·right·words.

The belongings people accumulate throughout their lives will always own them. People seem to think if they had more they’d be happier or freer, but their possessions only chain them to the earth.

New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it - once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.

I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at the table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values.

I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. 'Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.'

I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

And never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

The only thing that we know is that we know nothing — and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.