When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.

This is a writer’s lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.

It seems to me that people who don’t learn as easily as others suffer from a kind of learning disability—there is something different about the way they comprehend unfamiliar material—but I fail to see how this disability is improved by psychiatric consultation. What seems to be lacking is a technical ability that those of us called ‘good students’ are born with. Someone should concretely study these skills and teach them. What does a shrink have to do with the process?

We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it - and reward it in all manner of ways.

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!