Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

(Clothes) cannot change a man's nature. He's either kind or he isn't, with or without clothes.

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.

I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.

It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'

... we are all terribly alone no matter what people say.

It's one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it's another not to be able to live by what one does know.