I think we're much more eager to know about our parents than we were in the seventies.

I was just reviewed by Robert Gottlieb, who was my editor at 'The New Yorker,' and he sort of wondered at the fact that I still need to exorcise my parents at my age. I think he makes a basic mistake in thinking that exorcism can ever be total. The exorcism of your parents will still be occurring on your own deathbed.

I didn't find this memoir of these two eccentric people so different from doing my memoirs of De Sade or Simone Weil. My parents in their own way are as odd as Sade.

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.

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

Lovers, children, heroes, none of them do we fantasize as extravagantly as we fantasize our parents.

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