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

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

Friendship is by its very nature freer of deceit than any other relationship we can know because it is the bond least affected by striving for power, physical pleasure, or material profit, most liberated from any oath of duty or of constancy. With Eros the body stands naked, in friendship our spirit is denuded.

Oh, save me God, but not quite yet.

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.

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

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