This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.

It's absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man, and he said to me, I was maybe 9, and he said to me, 'Philip, whenever you take a nap, take your clothes off, put a blanket on you, and you're going to sleep better.' Well, as with everything, he was right. ... Then the best part of it is that when you wake up, for the first 15 seconds, you have no idea where you are. You're just alive. That's all you know. And it's bliss, it's absolute bliss.

Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews.

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

--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others

Eventually the writing takes time. What I want to do is get the story down and I want to know what happens as I write my way into the knowledge of the story.

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