What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn't stay there any longer and had to go somewhere else to make it. That's all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That's how the country was settled.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

Then I buckled up my shoes, and I started.