I shake my head and the tiny acrobats fall like spangles, like the cool rain on another planet, down to the inside of my feet.

I remember the revelation it was to me when I realized I'd rather be smart in the way Elvis Presley was than in the way, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein was. The thing was, you could imagine you could be smart like Wittgenstein by just thinking hard enough, but Elvis just had it. It was almost spiritual. A kind of grace.

The problem with an autobiography is that all these extra factors make it difficult. You don't want to hurt people's feelings. You don't know how much you can trust your memory. You don't want it to be self-serving. And you have all these issues about how to present yourself. All these factors make it harder to do than a novel.

You're always thinking, "What does that add up to?" You can't really get a handle on it. I was curious. I felt like it would be an interesting challenge for me to write down what I'd seen and done and learned - all the convolutions captured in one item that I could look at and get some grip on what the hell happened.

When you're young, you don't especially think of yourself as being young. You're just alive and everything's interesting and you don't think of things in terms of age because you're not conscious of it.

A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.

I'm someone who's really susceptible to tears.