All life events are formative. All contribute to what we become, year by year, as we go on growing. As my friend the poet Kenneth Koch once said, You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!
Plot makes the character just as history makes the man.
Incidents of the past - a lost love, a missed opportunity - shape us and make us what we are.
No single crisis shapes a generation; but a succession of events, each one bringing its shaping blows to bear.
You are who you are at this moment because of everything that's ever happened to you, everything that you carried forward for yourself.
I think everything that happens to you becomes a part of what you end up doing and being and standing for.
Little things happen to us during the course of our lives when we were children that stay with us.
The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.
Our past absolutely defines everything we do in the present. We can't help it. We're made by the events of our past, so there's no escaping it.
Everything that I had done creatively related to two or three incidents that happened to me when I was a child that I'd forgotten. Everything, absolutely everything.
The things that you saw earlier in your life generally have more power than the things you saw last week.
But to the particular species of excellence men are directed, not by an ascendant planet or predominating humour, but by the first book which they read, some early conversation which they heard, or some accident which excited ardour and emulation.
