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

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

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

We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others.

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

The act of nutrition is not a purely physiological event... The family meal is a formality that cultivates in us... a capacity for sharing, generosity, thoughtfulness, a talent for civilized conversation.

The spiritual destiny of Hawaii has been shaped by a Calvinist theory of paternalism enacted by the descendants of the missionaries who had carried it there: a will to do good for unfortunates regardless of what the unfortunates thought about it.