I think most memoirs, though they purport to be about this particular time or this person you met, are really about the effect that person or time had on you.

I'm not confident, and yet I'm oddly confident. You have to have a certain amount of ego to be a writer in the first place, and to write things that might be controversial. I've wasted a lot of time worrying about it: am I tough enough to do it? Well, I guess, or I wouldn't have done it. The day it's too difficult for me, I guess I'll stop.

Writing is not a genteel profession; it's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.

Rosemary Mahoney Quotes