“You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk.”

“She considered [her] life, which had not been a life but only a sort of greeting, a Hello There.”

“Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.”

“What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?”

“We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words you are the hero of your own story.”

“Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’."(on Lillian Hellman)”

“I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.”