People always think their world is coming to an end if they're exposed, and of course it isn't coming to an end; it goes right on exactly the way it always was.

Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other's outstretched hand.

I've told the same story twelve different ways, but I think that's just part of what writers do. Once may not be enough.

My mother had died when I wrote my first book. I was twenty-seven, so it was right at the beginning of my writing life. I don't know if she had lived, if I would have done it, certainly not quite like I did. But, you can't rethink it. You wrote what you wrote, it meant something to other people, and that's your good.

I don't really think it comes as a shock to every writer if somebody in their family is mad at them. Yes, it's very upsetting. But it's inherent in the process of trying to make sense of one's life, which is what I think is perhaps at the bottom of writing at all.

If I were planning to be stranded on a desert island, I wouldn't take Freud's books with me, because I've already read them all.

We have to recognize that it is a very, very painful thing for people to be exposed to their social community, to be exposed in the world, as not what they would have wanted to be seen as. This is very painful and difficult for people.