Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world.

We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something--make something--with it. A story, we sense is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing.

Refuse to write your life and you have no life.

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

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

Looking repeatedly into the past, you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life, but rather with the phenomenon of memory.

In description we hear and feel the absorption of the author in the material. We sense the presence of the creator of the scene. .. This personal absorption is what we mean by 'style.' It is strange that we would choose so oddly surfacey a word - style - for this most soulful aspect of writing. We could, perhaps more exactly, call this relation between consciousness and its subject 'integrity.' What else is the articulation of perception?