I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.

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.

What is remembered is what becomes reality.

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

The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.

Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.

A careful first draft is a failed first draft