The artist's work, it is sometimes said, is to celebrate. But really that is not so; it is to express wonder. And something terrible resides at the heart of wonder. Celebration is social, amenable. Wonder has a chaotic splendor.

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

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

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.

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.

People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.

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