Looking repeatedly into the past, you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life, but rather with the phenomenon of memory.

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.

It is hard to sever the cords that tie us to our slavery and leave intact those that bind us to ourselves.

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

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.

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

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