The stories are not autobiographical, but they’re personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I’ve learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.
Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.
I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.
Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.
The complexity of things – the things within things – just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?
There’s a kind of tension that if I’m getting a story right I can feel right away, and I don’t feel that when I try to write a novel. I kind of want a moment that’s explosive, and I want everything gathered into that.
Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.
The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.
I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same.
The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they’re gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you’re going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.
Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.
I knew I would be famous one day. That’s because I lived in a very small town and nobody liked doing the same things I did, like writing.
Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.
It’s as if tendencies that seem most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, have come in as spores on the prevailing wind, looking for any likely place to land, any welcome.
Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.
I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.
You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.
Now i no longer believe that people’s secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.
Every year, when you’re a child, you become a different person.