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.

I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.

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

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

We only store in memory images of value. To write about one's life is to live it twice, and the second time is both spiritual and historical.

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.

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.