I think we're much more eager to know about our parents than we were in the seventies.

We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others.

One learns much more by writing fiction, because the insights come from those deeper subconscious levels where the greater and more interesting truths lie.

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.

Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make your life bearable.

Why are there no great women artists?' sounds as ignorant of human geography as the query 'Why are there no Eskimo tennis teams?

I shall never cease to marvel at the way we beg for love and tyranny.

All our parents have levels of deviousness. We're driven to write about this discrepancy between the bright shining selves they invented and the monsters lurking underneath.

Art is both a vengeance against reality and a reconciliation with it.

I venture that those of us who are most serene when faced with the possibility of nothingness are the ones who've reached furthest to the downward and upward of their beings.

As to why people like Joseph Lelyveld are writing memoirs, I think they're just catching on the coattails of the trend.

The greater ignorance towards a country is not ignoring what its politicians have to say, it is ignoring what the inmates in its prisons have to say.

Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?

I have gotten so used to melancholia that I greet it like an old friend.

I'm not impressed with presidents. I have met a few, but I'm not impressed with them.

I'm a Reagan Republican, which means I don't speak ill of other Republicans.

If you light a lamp for somebody, it will also brighten your path.

I don't look so much for tips. But when they interview a Nicklaus or a Palmer, I'm all ears. I listen to guys who have done it, been successful for years.

The only failure is not trying.

I do not condone hostility toward any church simply to vent personal malice or umbrage.

We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while it's not always.