We passed from laughter to terror which, like love and hate, are close relatives.
Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing.
Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?
Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.
We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves: it is all criticism of criticism.
I believe that misconceptions about oneself that one does not correct where possible act as a bad magic.
Infinite is a meaningless word: except – it states / The mind is capable of performing / an endless process of addition.
Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently. Things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth.
To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.
To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme type of all that a host and hostess should not be.
I say every dog looks like no other but that isn't true. Not entirely. Difference is slippery.
Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.
I don't have a game plan. I have no idea what I'll be doing next.
And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.
The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.
Varios tragos es la vida y un solo trago es la muerte. (del poema "Sentado sobre los muertos")
I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive.
I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.
I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look.
The audiobooks I buy are never first-time reads - only rereadings of books I know well that I find intoxicating.
The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.
