Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.

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

Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page...Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise.

Memoir isn't the summary of a life; it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It's not; it's a deliberate construction.

Writers can write to affirm and to celebrate, or they can write to debunk and destroy; the choice is ours.

Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.

A writer is obviously at his most natural and relaxed when he writes in the first person. Writing is a personal transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and the transaction will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.