Budapest in late May is a city of lilacs. The sweet, languid, rather sleepy smell of lilacs wafts everywhere. And it is a city of lovers, many of them quite middle-aged. Walking with their arms around each other, embracing and kissing on park benches. A sensuousness very much bound up (it seems to me) with the heady ubiquitous smell of lilacs.

One man's insanity is another man's genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

Only in love is there trust - even the possibility of trust.

Princeton is quite integrated. Women are professors at Princeton. Women are students at Princeton. That began in the 1970s.

Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.