All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard.

There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed.

Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself

When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.

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.