All our parents have levels of deviousness. We're driven to write about this discrepancy between the bright shining selves they invented and the monsters lurking underneath.

one forgives parents as naturally as one emancipates oneself from them - usually shortly afterward.

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.

We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others.

I venture that those of us who are most serene when faced with the possibility of nothingness are the ones who've reached furthest to the downward and upward of their beings.

One learns much more by writing fiction, because the insights come from those deeper subconscious levels where the greater and more interesting truths lie.

As to why people like Joseph Lelyveld are writing memoirs, I think they're just catching on the coattails of the trend.