True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world

A careful first draft is a failed first draft

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

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.

French was the only language we had in common, and even that was like a dialect we had picked up at a rummage sale, rusty and missing a lot of essential parts.