It bothers me that I won't live to see the end of the century, because, when I was young, in St. Louis, I remember saying to Marilyn, my sister by adoption, that that was how long I wanted to live: seventy years.

I am sensible of the velocity of the moments, and entering that part of my head alert to the motion of the world I am aware that life was never perfect, never absolute. This bestows contentment, even a fearlessness.

I feel sorry for the man who marries you... because everyone thinks you're sweet and you're not.

I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calk, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven. ... I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event.

Me, my literary reputation is mostly abroad, but I am anchored here in New York. I can't think of any other place I'd rather die than here.

Often writing is like a struggle to get back to a kind of belated, quite impure virginity.

It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself.