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.

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.

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.

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

The light ought to shine for the darkness to fade.

If the universe is infinite, then every possibility must exist in reality, yes?

Oh I have been to Ludlow fair, and left my necktie God knows where. And carried half way home, or near, pints and quarts of Ludlow beer.

In woods where the woodsmen told lies, maybe it was the wolves who told the truth.

It requires a strong mind to bear up against several languages. Some persons have learnt so many, that they have ceased to think in any one.

What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?

Donald Trump is sitting on the control deck of the starship Enterprise, and he can push a lot of pretty buttons, but those buttons aren't connected to anything. And so nothing is happening.

I never thought Oregon would elect to the U.S. Senate a Mormon, but it did.

The United States is off the international spectrum in religious extremism.

Wounds simply won't heal if they are swept under the carpet.