one forgives parents as naturally as one emancipates oneself from them - usually shortly afterward.

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

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.

I was just reviewed by Robert Gottlieb, who was my editor at 'The New Yorker,' and he sort of wondered at the fact that I still need to exorcise my parents at my age. I think he makes a basic mistake in thinking that exorcism can ever be total. The exorcism of your parents will still be occurring on your own deathbed.

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

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.

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