Quote collection
302 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I met Lee Harvey Oswald, in Moscow just after he defected. One night I was having dinner with a friend, an Italian newspaper correspondent, and when he came by to pick me up he asked me if I'd mind going with him first to talk to a young American defector, one Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was staying at the Metropole, an old Czarist hotel just off Kremlin Square."
"I just live one day at a time. That's my new theory in life."
"It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural."
"And yes, to answer you seriously, I am beginning to be... well, not bored, but tempted; afraid, but tempted. When you've been in pain for a long time, when you wake up every morning with a rising sense of hysteria, then boredom is what you want, marathon sleeps, a silence in yourself."
"You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who's a friend."
"If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it....for me, every act of the art of solving a mystery."
"[T]he army of wrongness rampant in the world might as well march over me."
"It should take you about four seconds to walk from here to the door. I'll give you two."
"I live in Brooklyn. By choice. Those ignorant of its allures are entitled to wonder why."
"I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought."
"It's redundant to die in Los Angeles."
"The way his plump hand clutched at her hip seemed somehow improper; not morally, aesthetically."
"Oh Jesus God we did belong to each other. He was mine."
"He’d always been willing to confess his faults, for, by admitting them, it was as if he made them no longer exist."
"Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is."
"I haven't anything against whores, except this: some of them may have an honest tongue but they all have dishonest hearts."
"She took off her dark glasses and squinted at me. It was as though her eyes were shattered prisms, the dots of blue and gray and green like broken bits of sparkle."
"But he does look stupid.' Yearning. Not stupid. He wants awfully to be on the inside staring out: anybody with their nose pressed against a glass is liable to look stupid."
"The instant she saw the letter she squinted her eyes and bent her lips in a tough tiny smile that advanced her age immeasurably. "Darling," she instructed me, "would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick."
"Many universities have asked me to come for a semester but I don't want to do it because I don't have the patience."