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

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

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

As to why people like Joseph Lelyveld are writing memoirs, I think they're just catching on the coattails of the trend.

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

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.

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