I think it's one of the reasons I wrote my book later in life. My parents didn't have these extreme alternations of conduct. They were very sweet to me.

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 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.

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

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

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