“Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world. ”
“Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time.”
“History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.”
“in writing like this, he was letting truth from beyond time into history, and thus making history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor...”
“Memoirs lie, but fiction tells the truth.”
“Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.”