I never look at fashion magazines. I find them incredibly boring.
What we refer to confidently as memory is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.
It was lovely when you found students who responded to things you were enthusiastic about.
If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.
The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters
His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.
My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and played with.
We laugh at a man who, stepping out of his room at the very minute when the sun is rising, says, “It is my will that the sun shall rise”; or at him who, unable to stop a wheel, says, “I wish it to roll”; or, again, at him who, thrown in a wrestling match, says, “Here I lie, but here I wish to lie. ” But, joking apart, do we not act like one of these three persons whenever we use the expression “I wish”?
. . . when I was angry at God because I couldn't go to my son, hold him, and comfort him, God's son was holding my son in his lap.
The world doesn't need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.
If it doesn't happen, the continuing oppression will be met by more resistance from a less tolerant populace which wants a democratic restoration. And that resistance will only invite further oppression.