The real subject of autobiography is not one's experience but one's consciousness. Memoirists use the self as a tool.

The artist's work, it is sometimes said, is to celebrate. But really that is not so; it is to express wonder. And something terrible resides at the heart of wonder. Celebration is social, amenable. Wonder has a chaotic splendor.

The real subject of autobiography is not one's experience but one's consciousness. Memoirists use the self as a tool.

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

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.

Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.