Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.

It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.

If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital.

Our memory is a monster; you forget it - it does not.

The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.

A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.