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

landscape, that vast still life, invites description, not narration. It is lyric. It has no story: it is the beloved, and asks only to be contemplated.

poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.

The materials of true poetry are always humble, absolutely idiosyncratic, the autobiographical tatters that, in gifted hands, are made into the memoir that fits us all.

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.

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

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.