Oh, save me God, but not quite yet..

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

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

The vast Pacific ocean would always remain the islanders' great solace, escape and nourishment, the amniotic fluid that would keep them hedonistic an….

I write because in the act of creation there comes that mysterious, abundant sense of being both parent and child; I am giving birth to an Other and ….

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

I think it's one of the reasons I wrote my book later in life. My parents didn't have these extreme alternations of conduct. They were very sweet to ….

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

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

The irreversibility of time. That's the hardest thing to accept at our age, that's the most violent aspect of death..

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

Like most writers I know, I love being on stage. I’ve sublimated the dramatic urge by teaching and by making people laugh..

If I were ever to go mad it would be on Thanksgiving Day, that day of guilt and grace when the family hangs upon you like an ax over a sacrificial vi….

Mine [parents] started out more from scratch, because I'm constantly aware of what they suffered in the war..

Friendship is by its very nature freer of deceit than any other relationship we can know because it is the bond least affected by striving for power,….

I was just reviewed by Robert Gottlieb, who was my editor at 'The New Yorker,' and he sort of wondered at the fact that I still need to exorcise my p….

The act of nutrition is not a purely physiological event... The family meal is a formality that cultivates in us... a capacity for sharing, generosit….

one forgives parents as naturally as one emancipates oneself from them - usually shortly afterward..

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

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

The choice between starving and being eaten is an exotic one..