Grief is illness. You cannot breathe you cannot walk or eat or sleep. The sickness is entire, the body and the spirit.

Inspiration is just one requirement for being a writer. Another is keeping regular working hours.

There's no privacy for the violently dead.

Every door opens to something and it is better to go toward that something than to sit staring at the blank wall of time.

No war can end war except a total war which leaves no human creature on earth. Each war creates the causes of war: hate, desire for revenge and have-nots, desperate with need.

A country inn is a percolator. News seeps, simmers, and bubbles.

pity runs its course. An hour comes when no hand but your own can build your future.

Each husband gets the infidelity he deserves.

of all the deprivations which afflict humankind, none is more dreadful than loneliness. A corrosive, it eats the heart out. People were meant to live by twos, with someone close with whom to share good and bad, to hear breathing in the dark room at night. Being alone is the one unnatural act.

Destiny is thrifty. To weave her tapestry, she uses even the tiniest snips of thread.

New York's the place where you can have a private life. You can do anything, be anything you please. New Yorkers mind their own business. Police cars, ambulances, fire engines - nobody even turns around for them. We go to the movies for excitement.