"There is a common superstition that 'self-respect is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation."

"Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone."

"New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself."

"Medicine, I have reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art."

"Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service."

"In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see."

"The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs."

"We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know."

"We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not.... We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget."

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

"The apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and why we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love."

"We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget."

"I put the word 'diagnosis' in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a 'diagnosis' led to a 'cure,' or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility."

"The death of a parent, he wrote, 'despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago..."

"I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing."

"Privilege' is something else.'Privilege' is a judgment.'Privilege' is an opinion.'Privilege' is an accusation."

"Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored."

"When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children."

"To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect."

"Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested - ask any doctor - that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known."

"Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them."

"She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card."

"And except on a certain kind of winter evening-six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that-except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it."

"Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?"

"He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them."

"Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel."

"Nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself."

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."

"Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life - is the source from which self-respect springs."

"The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream."

"Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it."

"Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins."

"The child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult."

"We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections. . . .Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life."

"It is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built 'The Breakers he damned himself."

"It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento."

"Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is 'nothing."

"Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention."

"Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignation with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards- the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed."

"Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power."

"I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give."

"I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly."

"Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power."

"I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree....Those of us less inclined to compliment ourselves on our parenting skills, in other words most of us, recite rosaries of our failures, our neglects, our derelictions and delinquencies."

"There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."

"To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is a dissatisfaction with self."

"It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not."

"I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water."

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be."

"It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come-was anyone ever so young?"