I venture that those of us who are most serene when faced with the possibility of nothingness are the ones who've reached furthest to the downward and upward of their beings.

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.

If I were ever to go mad it would be on Thanksgiving Day, that day of guilt and grace when the family hangs upon you like an ax over a sacrificial victim, like the oven's heat on that poor bird.

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

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

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

The choice between starving and being eaten is an exotic one.