I've always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they're relations, they have a place in the American family. They're the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.

And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.

Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.