The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.

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

The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another, more valuable one is the ancient function of metaphor, as it was of alchemy.

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.

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

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

Memoirists wish to tell their mind, not their story.