When he [Joe Lewis] was asked upon his retirement about his long career, Joe sweetly summed it up in just ten words. 'I did the best I could with what I had'.

It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.

Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.