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

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

Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relationship with the past. Psychotherapy, that widespread method for promoting mental health, relies heavily on memory and on the ability to retrieve and organize images and events from the personal pastIf we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us—to write the first draft and then return for the second draft—we are doing the work of memory.

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

Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.

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.

A careful first draft is a failed first draft