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.

how the French can talk. About a stew, about a fly on the parapet, about death, about anything.

Art is both a vengeance against reality and a reconciliation with it.

I shall never cease to marvel at the way we beg for love and tyranny.

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

I think it's one of the reasons I wrote my book later in life. My parents didn't have these extreme alternations of conduct. They were very sweet to me.

The irreversibility of time. That's the hardest thing to accept at our age, that's the most violent aspect of death.