 My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn't always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have. |
| I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes. |
| I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life. |
| My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of. |
| The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye. |
| People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy. |
| I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person. |
| No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant. |
| Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power. |
| In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you. |
| My mother said I was a clingy kid until I was about four. I also remember that from the age of eight she and I fought almost every day. |
| That was a wonderful period in my life. I mean, I didn't become an artist, but somebody let me do something I loved. What a luxury, to do something you love to do. |
| I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice. |
| I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression. |
| I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house. |
| I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away. |
| I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was. |
