I am in an adolescence in reverse, as mysterious as the first, except that this time I feel it as a decay of the odds that I might live for a while, that I can sleep it off.

Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.

I am sensible of the velocity of the moments, and entering that part of my head alert to the motion of the world I am aware that life was never perfect, never absolute. This bestows contentment, even a fearlessness.

Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end in one's head.

But death's acquisitive instincts will win.

This identity, this mind, this particular cast of speech, is nearly over.

So an autobiography about death should include, in my case, an account of European Jewry and of Russian and Jewish events - pogroms and flights and murders and the revolution that drove my mother to come here.

True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.

In New York one lives in the moment rather more than Socrates advised, so that at a party or alone in your room it will always be difficult to guess at the long term worth of anything.

It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself.

I can't change the past, and I don't think I would. I don't expect to be understood. I like what I've written, the stories and two novels. If I had to give up what I've written in order to be clear of this disease, I wouldn't do it.

Me, my literary reputation is mostly abroad, but I am anchored here in New York. I can't think of any other place I'd rather die than here.

I was always crazy about New York, dependent on it, scared of it - well, it is dangerous - but beyond that there was the pressure of being young and of not yet having done work you really liked, trademark work, breakthrough work.

I feel sorry for the man who marries you... because everyone thinks you're sweet and you're not.

I look upon another's insistence on the merits of his or her life - duties, intellect, accomplishment - and see that most of it is nonsense.

Death and I are head to head in a total collision, pure and mutual distaste.

I have thousands of opinions still - but that is down from millions - and, as always, I know nothing.

If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination.

Almost the first thing I did when I became ill was to buy a truly good television set.

I am in an adolescence in reverse, as mysterious as the first, except that this time I feel it as a decay of the odds that I might live for a while, that I can sleep it off.

Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been.

It is death that goes down to the center of the earth, the great burial church the earth is, and then to the curved ends of the universe, as light is said to do.

God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle - or instruction.

I awake with a not entirely sickened knowledge that I am merely young again and in a funny way at peace, an observer who is aware of time's chariot, aware that some metamorphosis has occurred.

It bothers me that I won't live to see the end of the century, because, when I was young, in St. Louis, I remember saying to Marilyn, my sister by adoption, that that was how long I wanted to live: seventy years.

Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice.

Premature burial works just fine as a cure for adolescence.

Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion.

I had very few friends. We always ate dinner with our parents. We didn't want to go out. American adolescence was a lot wilder than I would have felt comfortable with.

Even as kids reach adolescence, they need more than ever for us to watch over them. Adolescence is not about letting go. It's about hanging on during a very bumpy ride.

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.

Maturity is only a short break in adolescence.

With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child's problems will never be important enough for a television movie.

Adolescence as the time when an individual 'recapitulates' the savage stage of the race's past.

Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.

Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts.

The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.

Adolescence is just one big walking pimple.

I'm quite comfortable looking at myself in movies, probably because I've been doing it for so long, since I was a kid. So I sort of watched myself grow up and go through adolescence, like, basically on camera.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very, very involved and interested in art, and particularly in animated movies.

Adolescence isn't just about prom or wearing sparkly dresses.

Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.

Snow and adolescence are the only problems that disappear if you ignore them long enough.

The conflict between the need to belong to a group and the need to be seen as unique and individual is the dominant struggle of adolescence.

Young dancers are training at a very vulnerable time in their lives, through adolescence, and while they are trying to work out who they are as people, never mind as a dancer. So train the whole person, not just the dancer.

I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence.

Adolescence is society's permission slip for combining physical maturity with psychological irresponsibility.