Most good essays are conversations with yourself - not just your decided thoughts but your dilemmas.

Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent.

The knowledge that my discriminations are skewed and not always universally desirable doesn't stop me in the least from making them.

My wife and daughter have accused me of being too silent at breakfast but I don't want to talk when I don't have much to say.

If someone in my family is getting emotionally bent out of shape, I've had to learn to adapt.

Confession makes you a more trustworthy narrator.

It bothers me when I can't, for example, remember a name. I don't know if it's pre-senility or whether there are too many names packed in our brains.