The school was nothing but reminiscence - of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincin….

Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash..

I'm an atheist, I always thought, 'This is it.' If there is going to be a heaven, it should be on earth. I feel much happier than most people. I'm fa….

Tennessee Williams recognized that great theater begins with great talkers, and that great talkers obey two rules: they never sound like anyone else ….

I felt if I went chronologically, I'd get bogged down in childhood and that's part of our culture of complaint in America. This endless wailing about….

I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having too much sex. At what point does a healthy amount become too much? There are….

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great..

Perhaps I became so vague, so exhilarated with vagueness, precisely in order to forestall a recognition of the final term of the syllogism that begin….

Marie Calloway has a very specific literary personality that the reader is intrigued by: she's masochistic, loves to experiment, is quickly bored and….

As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm an identity I….

Ive always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience..

Paris... is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail..

The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books..

Do we regard language as more public, more ceremonial, than thought? Just as family men condemn the profanity on the stage that they use constantly i….

The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure..

How thrilling to discover one had depths, how consoling to find them less polluted than the shallows, how encouraging to identify the enemy not as a ….

At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later..

The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main theme….

I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized o….

I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique..

I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out..