Quotes from Francine du Plessix Gray

Oh, save me God, but not quite yet.

Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make your life bearable.

If I were ever to go mad it would be on Thanksgiving Day, that day of guilt and grace when the family hangs upon you like an ax over a sacrificial victim, like the oven's heat on that poor bird.

I think it's one of the reasons I wrote my book later in life. My parents didn't have these extreme alternations of conduct. They were very sweet to me.

The irreversibility of time. That's the hardest thing to accept at our age, that's the most violent aspect of death.

Like most writers I know, I love being on stage. I've sublimated the dramatic urge by teaching and by making people laugh.

I shall never cease to marvel at the way we beg for love and tyranny.

We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others.

A heart of fire in a shell of ice.

Oh, save me God, but not quite yet.

Ah women, women, my life's plague and chief delight!

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.

Art is both a vengeance against reality and a reconciliation with it.

I venture that those of us who are most serene when faced with the possibility of nothingness are the ones who've reached furthest to the downward and upward of their beings.

how the French can talk. About a stew, about a fly on the parapet, about death, about anything.