Our mythology tells us so much about fathers and sons. ... What do we know about mothers and daughters? ... Our power is so oblique, so hidden, so ethereal a matter, that we rarely struggle with our daughters over actual kingdoms or corporate shares. On the other hand, our attractiveness dries as theirs blooms, our journey shortens just as theirs begins. We too must be afraid and awed and amazed that we cannot live forever and that our replacements are eager for their turn, indifferent to our wishes, ready to leave us behind.

Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.

I think that certainly the artists of the '40s, '50s and '60s were fighting a very conformist society, which didn't give them enough space to live or create, and they were bucking all kinds of spoken and unspoken rules.

Romanticizing the act of writing or any other art is not very helpful to the artist or the art. It's much better if one simply does.

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.

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.

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