We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

Was it always my nature to take a bad time and block out the good times, until any success became an accident and failure seemed the only truth?

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

Unjust. How many times I've used that word, scolded myself with it. All I mean by it now is that I don't have the final courage to say that I refuse to preside…

On jazz: 'Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other coun…

To understand a man, you must know his memories. The same is true of a nation.

The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient …