Novels are completed when they are finished, but the memoir changes its own conclusion by virtue of being written... I was not at all the same person, when I handed the manuscript to the publisher, as I had been when I began. A memoir may always be retrospective, but the past is not where its action takes place.

If there were nothing else, reading would--obviously--be worth living for.

Did anyone ever hear of an intelligent fantasy?

My life burned inside me. Even such as it was, it was the only record of me, and it was my only creation, and something in me would not accept that it was insignificant.

A bugler sounded the Last Post. Heartbreak made audible.

Do the thing that's less passive. Do the active thing. There's more of the human in that.

Lovers are allowed to be as cruel as anything to the one who dissappoints them.