You learn to write by writing.

If you would like to write better than everybody else, you have to want to write better than everybody else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you've written against the various middlemen - editors, agents and publishers - whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards not so high.

To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do.

Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.

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

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.