“Oh, I adore to cook. It makes me feel so mindless in a worthwhile way.”

“She would not admit she was making a mess. Unfazed by bacon already shriveled and coffee stone-cold, she poured her mixings onto a grill she'd forgotten to grease, and said, "Oh I adore to cook: it makes me feel so mindless in a worthwhile way.”

“I’ve tried that. I’ve tried aspirin, too. Rusty thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle. What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.”

“There's lots of things you don't know. All kinds of strange things . . . mostly they happened before we were born: that makes them seem to me so much more real.”

“I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.”

“Randolph," he said, "were you ever as young as me?" And Randolph said: "I was never so old.”

“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.”