The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it

I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.

It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.

I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.

Mourning has its place but also its limits.