Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to 'tell a story.' They want to tell it all - the all of personal experience, of consciousness itself. That includes a story, but also the whole expanding universe of sensation and thought ... Memoirists wish to tell their mind. Not their story.

I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.

We only store in memory images of value. To write about one's life is to live it twice, and the second time is both spiritual and historical.

Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.

A peculiarity of the American historical sensibility allows us to be proud of great-grandfathers (or even grandfathers) who lived in crushing poverty, while the poverty of a father is too close for comfort.