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.

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.

In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.

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

It's always a thrilling risk to say exactly what you mean, to express exactly what you see.

What is remembered is what becomes reality.

A careful first draft is a failed first draft