Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.

The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

Women really are not supposed to be imaginative. That creativity of this kind is supposed to belong to men. You know, because women make babies. I find the double standards shocking.

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.