I am getting much more political as I get older. It's the duty of any writer, in particular, not to stand back from the world.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear...Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.

I don't own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don't want to drown. My head is my heart's lifebelt.

I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it.

Very often history is a means of denying the past.

Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.