Writers are entirely egocentric. To them, few things in their lives have meaning or importance unless they give promise of serving some creative purpose.

Old age is somewhat like dieting. Every day there is less of us to be observed.

Searching for the self when I was entirely alone was hazardous. What if I found not so much a great emptiness as a space full of unpleasant contents, a compound of long-hidden truths, closeted, buried, forgotten. When I went looking, I was playing a desperate game of hide-and-seek, fearful of what I might find, most afraid that I would find nothing.

one keeps one's friends better when one is alone. The corollary to this is that one loses one's friends, slowly, when one sees them too often or when they visit for too long a time.

These short stories establish Sontag's originality . . . her unique vision, her success with experiments in the form . . . Sontag makes a wonderful stew of the past, the life caught in memory and imagination, serves it all up lavishly laced with silences, and provides us with a gourmand's series of short courses.

My eyes glaze over at a writer solving tiny problems.

A hand up is worthier than one's own fist grasping a higher rung of the ladder.