No particular motive for living, except the custom and habit of it.
Everyone became brave from excess of terror.
Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports. . . . When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.
You can't get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.
I wouldn't say Donald Trump is a champion for white America, I think he shares a lot of the issues and values of white America.
I left the Midwest thinking I didn't fit in. But when I got to New York, I realized how truly Midwestern I was.
I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.