I have no television to go on so I get a lot of writing done. That's my substitute for television.

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

Writing when you are already very old means you have lived through the endings of so many things, you are more aware of the shape life takes. You begin to know Death, you've been close to it. But youth can barely imagine the end of this journey.

I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

Altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred.

Nothing is durable, I think anybody who thinks sex is durable is going to have a lot of grief.