Best 28 quotes of Francine Du Plessix Gray on MyQuotes

All our parents have levels of deviousness. We're driven to write about this discrepancy between the bright shining selves they invented and the monsters lurking underneath.

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.

As to why people like Joseph Lelyveld are writing memoirs, I think they're just catching on the coattails of the trend.

Friendship is by its very nature freer of deceit than any other relationship we can know because it is the bond least affected by striving for power, physical pleasure, or material profit, most liberated from any oath of duty or of constancy. With Eros the body stands naked, in friendship our spirit is denuded.

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

I didn't find this memoir of these two eccentric people so different from doing my memoirs of De Sade or Simone Weil. My parents in their own way are as odd as Sade.

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

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.

I think we're much more eager to know about our parents than we were in the seventies.

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.

I was just reviewed by Robert Gottlieb, who was my editor at 'The New Yorker,' and he sort of wondered at the fact that I still need to exorcise my parents at my age. I think he makes a basic mistake in thinking that exorcism can ever be total. The exorcism of your parents will still be occurring on your own deathbed.

I write because in the act of creation there comes that mysterious, abundant sense of being both parent and child; I am giving birth to an Other and simultaneously being reborn as a child in the playground of creation.

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

Lovers, children, heroes, none of them do we fantasize as extravagantly as we fantasize our parents.

Mine [parents] started out more from scratch, because I'm constantly aware of what they suffered in the war.

one forgives parents as naturally as one emancipates oneself from them - usually shortly afterward.

One learns much more by writing fiction, because the insights come from those deeper subconscious levels where the greater and more interesting truths lie.

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

The act of nutrition is not a purely physiological event... The family meal is a formality that cultivates in us... a capacity for sharing, generosity, thoughtfulness, a talent for civilized conversation.

The choice between starving and being eaten is an exotic one.

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

The spiritual destiny of Hawaii has been shaped by a Calvinist theory of paternalism enacted by the descendants of the missionaries who had carried it there: a will to do good for unfortunates regardless of what the unfortunates thought about it.

The vast Pacific ocean would always remain the islanders' great solace, escape and nourishment, the amniotic fluid that would keep them hedonistic and aloof, guarded, gentle and mysterious.

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

Why are there no great women artists?' sounds as ignorant of human geography as the query 'Why are there no Eskimo tennis teams?

...in Aristotle...leisure is a far more noble, spiritual goal than work...leisure is pursued solely for its own sake...: the pleasures of music and poetry, ... conversation with friends, and ...gratuitous, playful speculation. In Latin, the ultimate good is otium — the opposite is negotium, or gainful work. We have sought too much counsel in the proto-Calvinist work ethic preached by St Paul...during the cessation of work we nurture family, educate, nourish friendships....in loafing, most of our innovations come...the routine of daily work has too often served as...sleep...a refuge from two crucial states — awakedness to the needs of others, and to the transcendent, which only comes...loitering, dallying, tarrying, goofing off.