No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.

The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust.

I had come to feel that my mother's love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and I didn't know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than become just an echo of someone.

When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule.