You are the instrument of your own illumination.

The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.

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.

When cafe life thrives, talk is a shared limberness of the mind that improves appetite for conversation: an adequate sentence maker is then made good, a good one excellent, an excellent one extraordinary.

Widowhood provided Mama with a higher form of being. In refusing to recover from my father's death she had discovered that her life was endowed with a seriousness her years in the kitchen had denied her. She remained devoted to this seriousness for thirty years. She never tired of it, never grew bored or restless in its company, found new ways to keep alive the interest it deserved and had so undeniably earned.

in New York there's such diversity that there's no one central identity; everyone is marginal.

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.