I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.

Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.

Hitler admired Stalin, quite properly seeing himself as a mere infant in crime compared to his great exemplar.