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

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.

A careful first draft is a failed first draft

Writing about why you write is a funny business, like scratching what doesn't itch. Impulses are mysterious, and explaining them must be done with mirrors, like certain cunning slight-of-hand routines.

No memoirists writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just memory.

You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.

We store in memory only images of value. The value may be lost over the passage of time, but that's the implacable judgment of feeling.