Quotes from Jeffrey Berman

Donald Hall asked Henry Moore] 'what is the secret of life?' [Moore answered] 'The secret is to devote your whole life to one ambition. Concentrate everything you know, everything you can summon, to accomplish this one desire. But remember: Choose something you can't do.

Why read the memoir? Sven Birkerts offers a succinct reason. 'The point—the glory—of memoir is that it anchors its authority in the actual life; it is a modeling of the process of creative self-inquiry as it is applied to the stuff of lived experience. This really happened is the baseline contention of the memoir.