I may cause someone to feel badly, not because I'm doing something to them, but because the way in which I see might cause pain. But I am not doing the hurting.

Sex is the killer. Sexual love makes you feel more vulnerable than any other kind of love. That's one reason that people are so thorny and so vulnerable and so easily wounded when in love.

self-possession is the ability to face without fear life in all its contradictions.

What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

They say writers sell everybody out. What can you do? You know only the people you know.

I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.

That's the hardest thing to do-to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.