Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.

In fact I no longer value this kind of memento. I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. There was a period, a long period, dating from my childhood until quite recently, when I thought I did. A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep them with me, by preserving their mementos, their "things," their totems.

...quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage.

I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.

You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.