Francine du Plessix Gray quotes:

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

The spiritual destiny of Hawaii has been shaped by a Calvinist theory of paternalism enacted by the descendants of the missionaries who had carried it there: a will to do good for unfortunates regardless of what the unfortunates thought about it.

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.

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 simultaneously being reborn as a child in the playground of creation.

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

The vast Pacific ocean would always remain the islanders' great solace, escape and nourishment, the amniotic fluid that would keep them hedonistic and aloof, guarded, gentle and mysterious.

The act of nutrition is not a purely physiological event... The family meal is a formality that cultivates in us... a capacity for sharing, generosity, thoughtfulness, a talent for civilized conversation.

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

Oh, save me God, but not quite yet.

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

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 me.

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

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 odd as Sade.

how the French can talk. About a stew, about a fly on the parapet, about death, about anything.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 victim, like the oven's heat on that poor bird.

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

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

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

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

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

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, physical pleasure, or material profit, most liberated from any oath of duty or of constancy. With Eros the body stands naked, in friendship our spirit is denuded.

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.

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 parents at my age. I think he makes a basic mistake in thinking that exorcism can ever be total. The exorcism of your parents will still be occurring on your own deathbed.