Our lives don't really belong to us, you see -- they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.

I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.

[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that.

I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.

When the publisher here in America wanted to put the word "memoir" on the title page [of 'Winter Journal'] and on the cover, I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no." No genre whatsoever. It's an independent work not really connected to those things at all.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It's the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.