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

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.

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.

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.

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

All our parents have levels of deviousness. We're driven to write about this discrepancy between the bright shining selves they invented and the monsters lurking underneath.