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.

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

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

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.

Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make your life bearable.

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

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