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

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.

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

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.

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

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

one forgives parents as naturally as one emancipates oneself from them - usually shortly afterward.