"Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic."

"Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos."

"Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?"

"Laws of silence don't work....When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant...."

"The future is called 'perhaps,' which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you."

"Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life."

"Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable.--Blanche Dubois."

"You can be young without money but you can't be old without it."

"The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks."

"When things don't change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them."

"A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with."

"It's interesting, isn't it? . . . the chandelier . . . it reminds me of mushroom soup."

"In human character, simplicity doesn't exist except among simpletons."

"All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent."

"Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question."

"All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress."

"We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress."

"Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going."

"Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else."

"Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death's the other."

"A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young and believing."

"I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! - Don't turn the light on!"

"I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really."

"These are the intensities that one cannot live with, that he has to outgrow if he wants to survive. But who can help grieving for them? If the blood vessels could hold them, how much better to keep those early loves with us?"

"To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy."

"Luck is believing you're lucky."

"I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block."

"Ignorance of mortality is a comfort."

"It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work in not only convenient but unavoidable."

"The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that's true of everyone, don't you?"

"Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!"

"Death is one moment, and life is so many of them."

"Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead."

"The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire-escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation."

"Chance, you've gone past something you couldn't afford to go past; your time, your youth, you've passed it. It's all you had and you've had it."

"You'll be surprised how infinitely merciful they [these tablets] are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!"

"I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world."

"Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching."

"I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

"He was always running or bounding, never just walking. He seemed always at the point of defeating the law of gravity."

"We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal."

"Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama."

"We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins for life."

"The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one's office for a job."

"There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go."

"Security is a kind of death."

"Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation."

"You said, 'They're harmless dreamers and they're loved by the people.' 'What,' I asked you, 'is harmless about a dreamer, and what,' I asked you, 'is harmless about the love of the people? Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams."

"I've been accused of having a death wish but I think it's life that I wish for, terribly, shamelessly, on any terms whatsoever."

"And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing."