Occupation: Memoirist Birth: March 12, 1946
Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow--or kneel or get knocked down--to the fact that you are going to write ….
We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something--make something--with it. A story, we sense is the only ….
I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know..
These days it seems the lyric impulse, so seemingly fragile, comes in for a lot of abuse-or simply a lot of mistrust. What's it for, anyway, in this ….
Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth; sometimes it might beget a passion for decency..
Silence, that inspired dealer, takes the day's deck, the life, all in a crazy heap, lays it out, and plays its flawless hand of solitaire, every card….
People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal..
I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them..
What is remembered is what becomes reality..
The artist's work, it is sometimes said, is to celebrate. But really that is not so; it is to express wonder. And something terrible resides at the h….
It's always a thrilling risk to say exactly what you mean, to express exactly what you see..
Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy..
It is hard to sever the cords that tie us to our slavery and leave intact those that bind us to ourselves..
We only store in memory images of value. To write about one's life is to live it twice, and the second time is both spiritual and historical..
Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to 'tell a story.' They want to tell it all - the all of personal experience, of consciousness….
The real subject of autobiography is not one's experience but one's consciousness. Memoirists use the self as a tool..
True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world.
You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil..
French was the only language we had in common, and even that was like a dialect we had picked up at a rummage sale, rusty and missing a lot of essent….
In description we hear and feel the absorption of the author in the material. We sense the presence of the creator of the scene. .. This personal abs….
The cold was our pride, the snow was our beauty. It fell and fell, lacing day and night together in a milky haze, making everything quieter as it f….