What we refer to confidently as memory is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.

It was lovely when you found students who responded to things you were enthusiastic about.

The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters

A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.

My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.

Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.

It's deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.