Lovers, children, heroes, none of them do we fantasize as extravagantly as we fantasize our parents..

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

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 didn't find this memoir of these two eccentric people so different from doing my memoirs of De Sade or Simone Weil. My parents in their own way are….

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

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….

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….

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

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

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 an….

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 ….

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

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

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

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..

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,….