My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.

Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure

One reason we have children I think is to learn that parts of ourselves we had given up for dead are merely dormant and that the old joys can re emerge fresh and new and in a completely different form.

If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.

Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.

For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.

If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone