To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
What happened in New York and Washington and abroad seemed to impinge not at all upon the Sacramento min. I remember being taken to call upon a very old woman, a rancher's widow, who was reminiscing (...
It is not exactly any of these things. It is simply and rather astonishingly an enlarged version of a very common kind of California tract house, a monument not to colossal ego but to a weird absence...
It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we use...
I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.
I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world.
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 i...
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.
A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.Wrong, I want to say.In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.In fact I had lived my entire...
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is a dissatisfaction with self.
Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.
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.
Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been imp...
Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?
When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.
There was silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.
Raised to believe that her life would be, as her great-grandmother's was said to have been, one ceaseless round of fixed and settled principles, aims, motives, and activity, she could sometimes think...
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 w...
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.
What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?