I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.

And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger. We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I.

Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.

The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities.

We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.

In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.