Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.

Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.

Driving home, it's all I can do to keep from crying. Time's come, time's gone, time's never returning, I say to myself. What's here in front of me is all I've got, I decide, and as I drive my car through the blowing snow it doesn't seem like much, except for the kindness that I've just exchanged with an old lady, so I concentrate on that.

Motivations are too tangled and complex.

We are not buried in history, but surrounded by it. You can't avoid our behavior being shaped by it, to a considerable degree. We have this fantasy that we are free of history. This allows us not to see the circumstances, the historical circumstances of other people.

It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.