Having reached a point in which I was so bitter and exhausted from being a quote unquote public figure, I wanted to return to a more childlike relationship to writing.

In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

You are not supposed to get it. It's a paradox. All of mathematics is built on paradoxes. That's the biggest paradox of all-all this orderliness, and at the heart, impossibility. Contradiction. Heaven built on the foundations of hell.

When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.

Childhood smells of perfume and brownies.

I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled with despair - as if I had been handed a cup of ambrosial nectar to drink from and knew that once I finished drinking, the cup would be withdrawn forever, and nothing to come would ever taste as good.