Eventually the writing takes time. What I want to do is get the story down and I want to know what happens as I write my way into the knowledge of the story.

Everyone becomes a part of history whether they like it or not and whether they know it or not.

--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others

Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them--at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.

And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprintit’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania