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

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

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

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

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 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.

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