Life is sentimental. Why should I be cold and hard about it? That's the main content. The biggest thing in people's lives is their loves and dreams and visions, you know.

So when I made some money, I didn't have any idea how one handled such a situation because no one in our family ever had any money.

I can maintain my sense of the sacredness of existence only by understanding my own limitations and losing my self-importance.

I don't see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.

That's my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.

When we were children we were errant enough to wish to be birds for the day but there's nothing easier to lose than playfulness.