The more I focus on remembering, the more details I am likely to provide, but those particulars may well be invented [...] If you are one of those readers who relishes memoirs filled with impossibly specific memories I have this to say: those authors who claim perfect recall of their hash browns decades later are not to be trusted.

Sometimes memory is a knife.

Human beings are desperate to be seen and to see themselves reflected in the eyes of others, to feel the family comforts of "us", the charming caresses of the tribe

Hindsight gives a shape to what is shapeless as you live it.

The world loves poets and actors and some novelists who die young and never become jowly, dumpy, and arthritic, and they love them even more when they are tormented, hallucinating, and suicidal because the calm, reasonable artist, of which there are many, doesn't deliver the same frisson. And so we gild the young corpses, hold them up to the light, and watch them glow.