All there is to do, right at this very moment, is to breathe in, breathe out, and kiss the joy as it flies.

This may be a little bit of a provocative thing to say, but the memoirist doesn't owe the reader anything other than a good story and the inclining of the mind in the direction of memory. Of course, the memoirist is not allowed to make things up. But the really skilled memoirist knows what to leave in and what to leave out to serve the story. In autobiography you can't do that.

I don't want to lean back into the past, or forward into the future. I don't want to wish the present moment away. The truth is in the present moment. The great paradox is that when I'm really able to do that, time slows down and opens up. Time feels suddenly and inexplicably without end.

As a fiction writer, that's been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point?

When I lived in the city, I had learned to close my door against a lot of the noise, but when I open my door here, I'm not opening into the possibility that I'm going to run into somebody or be faced with a hundred choices about what I'm going to do, or which cafe I'm going to go to, or which way to distract myself.

I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.

You have to believe in yourself before the world has given you any indication that you should believe in yourself as a writer.