One of the most difficult things to say to another person is, 'I hope that you will love me for no good reason.' But it is what we all want and rarely dare to say to one another, to our children, to our parents and mates, to our friends, and to strangers, especially to strangers who have neither good, nor bad reasons to love us.

There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.

The issue of torture, connected to American soldiers, is not somewhere most people want to linger. We may not want to confront this issue so much in the U.S. because of how we want to think about our veterans. There's the sense that we want to think of our veterans as - if they're damaged, damaged by something glamorous, like a firefight.

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

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

Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It's done all right on its own so far.

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.