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

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

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 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.

If I were ever to go mad it would be on Thanksgiving Day, that day of guilt and grace when the family hangs upon you like an ax over a sacrificial victim, like the oven's heat on that poor bird.

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.

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.