I'm not nervous if I think about something for nine years and then I don't write it. Even if it fades it doesn't concern me. It'll come back if it's worth it.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly.

I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap, stories are generated.

In the olden days, a memoir was something written by Churchill and people like that, because they had a grand experience and considered it useful for future generations. And then it became what it became - a public purging in which other people have the chance to judge you and then forgive you, perhaps learning something from your sorry example.

Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity