“I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.”

“Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels.”

“...and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires”

“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.”

“These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire—I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.”

“I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside. ”

“I don't want to sound like Pollyanna," she began, "but you haven't grasped me yet. My courage is faith- faith in the eternal resilience of me- that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide- not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often- and the female hell is deadlier than the male.”