to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.

Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.

I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.

The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.