“My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta.But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless.”

“If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.”

“Perhaps I identify too well with my father's illicit awe. A trace of this seems caught in the photo, just as a trace of Roy has been caught on the light-sensitive paper...It's a curiously ineffectual attempt at censorship. Why cross out the year and not the month? Why, for that matter, leave the photo in the envelope at all?In an act of prestidigitation typical of the way my father juggled his public appearance and private reality, the evidence is simultaneously hidden and revealed.”

“I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy”

“If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.”

“I am not ultimately interested in writing fiction. I can't make things up. Or rather, I can only make things up about things that have already happened.”

“The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating.”