Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make your life bearable.

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

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

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.

Oh, save me God, but not quite yet.

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

I write because in the act of creation there comes that mysterious, abundant sense of being both parent and child; I am giving birth to an Other and simultaneously being reborn as a child in the playground of creation.