Art is both a vengeance against reality and a reconciliation with it.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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