We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.

To make an omelette, you need not only those broken eggs but someone 'oppressed' to beat them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make 51 percent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class.

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.

You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

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

We imagine things - that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. We have no choice, so we do it.

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

To believe in 'the greater good' is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.

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.

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

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

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

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.

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.

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

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

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

I think that life is difficult. People have challenges. Family members get sick, people get older, you don't always get the job or the promotion that you want. You have conflicts in your life. And really, life is about your resilience and your ability to go through your life and all of the ups and downs with a positive attitude.

We are so isolated in our own little worlds, in our own little geographies, that it's pretty hard to understand where someone else is coming from. And so I think that we have to really think about what that means as a country and, frankly, whether this segregation that we have is durable over the long run.