It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.

He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist’s success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Freud… studied his own dreams not because he was a “narcissist,” but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?