The disparity between what people said life was and what I knew it to be unnerved me at times, but I swore that nothing would ever make me say life s….

I am in an adolescence in reverse, as mysterious as the first, except that this time I feel it as a decay of the odds that I might live for a while, ….

But death's acquisitive instincts will win..

True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in t….

I awake with a not entirely sickened knowledge that I am merely young again and in a funny way at peace, an observer who is aware of time's chariot, ….

the cold winds of insecurity... hadn't shredded the dreamy chrysalis of his childhood. He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded win….

In New York one lives in the moment rather more than Socrates advised, so that at a party or alone in your room it will always be difficult to guess ….

My protagonists are my mother's voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen..

I'm sixty-two, and it's ecological sense to die while you're still productive, die and clear a space for others, old and young..

If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the….

Almost the first thing I did when I became ill was to buy a truly good television set..

Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself..

Often writing is like a struggle to get back to a kind of belated, quite impure virginity..

Death is not soft-mouthed, vague-footed, nearby. It is in the hall..

I have the sense that if I push too hard or too far into memory I’ll come apart..

It bothers me that I won't live to see the end of the century, because, when I was young, in St. Louis, I remember saying to Marilyn, my sister by ad….

I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims….

It is death that goes down to the center of the earth, the great burial church the earth is, and then to the curved ends of the universe, as light is….

Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end ….

I look upon another's insistence on the merits of his or her life - duties, intellect, accomplishment - and see that most of it is nonsense..

It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which….