Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth; sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.

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.

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

The paradox: there can be no pilgrimage without a destination, but the destination is also not the real point of the endeavor. Not the destination, but the willingness to wander in pursuit characterizes pilgrimage. Willingness: to hear the tales along the way, to make the casual choices of travel, to acquiesce even to boredom. That's pilgrimage -- a mind full of journey.

A careful first draft is a failed first draft

A peculiarity of the American historical sensibility allows us to be proud of great-grandfathers (or even grandfathers) who lived in crushing poverty, while the poverty of a father is too close for comfort.

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