Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she'd lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control of, definition of, self? That first true loss, the furious bafflement of it. And never again quite so assured, confident.

As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.

What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.