The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave….

A careful first draft is a failed first draft.

Refuse to write your life and you have no life..

poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception..

I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell..

Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust..

If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most ….

Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relationship with the past. Psychotherapy, that widespread method for promoting ….

We store in memory only images of value. The value may be lost over the passage of time, but that's the implacable judgment of feeling..

Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person..

Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself..

Prayer as focus is not a way of limiting what can be seen; it is a habit of attention brought to bear on all that is..

No memoirists writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, ju….

Here, in memory, we live and die..

The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another..

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….

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….

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 ….