Much more than memoir; it's history.

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

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.

The way I feel about every book is this: you don't finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn't write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn't have to write again, and I wouldn't want to. That's not true for everyone, but it's true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven't managed to do it.

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.