biographies are a little like marriages: You only have room in your life for one or two.

When you realize how hard it is to know the truth about yourself, you understand that even the most exhaustive and well-meaning autobiography, determined to tell the truth, represents, at best, a guess. There have been times in my life when I felt incredibly happy. Life was full. I seemed productive. Then I thought,"Am I really happy or am I merely masking a deep depression with frantic activity?" If I don't know such basic things about myself, who does?

biographies are a little like marriages: You only have room in your life for one or two.

an autobiography held out the promise of hearing truths that only friends confess to one another but are knowledge you need to live.

the challenge of nonfiction is to marry art and truth.

Perhaps that is what love is -- the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.

I believe we need literature, which, by allowing us to experience more fully, to imagine more fully, enables us to live more freely.