One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.

Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.

Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.

Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.

My commodity as a writer, whatever I'm writing about, is me. And your commodity is you. Don't alter your voice to fit the subject. Develop one voice that readers will recognize when they hear it on the page, a voice that's enjoyable not only in its musical line but in its avoidance of sounds that would cheapen its tone: breeziness and condescension and clichés.

If writing seems hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things people do.