Mine [parents] started out more from scratch, because I'm constantly aware of what they suffered in the war.

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

Like most writers I know, I love being on stage. I’ve sublimated the dramatic urge by teaching and by making people laugh.

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

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

I write because in the act of creation there comes that mysterious, abundant sense of being both parent and child; I am giving birth to an Other and simultaneously being reborn as a child in the playground of creation.

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